What is a teaching? -- 4

This summer's series has been transcribed from a talk

given by Roger Lipsey in Cambridge in 2011.

What kind of thing is a teaching? What makes a teaching different from other cultural phenomena? An authentic teaching is a conversation and a basis for a search. Teachings have teachers and histories. What more is true of teachings?

Teachings are also a culture

The founders of teachings are such dynamic individuals, so creative, so original that they revalue values. They redefine culture in many zones. Take for an example Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy in the early twentieth century. Steiner was a western Christian mystic, a person of strong and original inner life, but he was also culturally creative. He created a new architecture, a new form of dance, a new agriculture, a new schooling system—the Waldorf Schools, still widely respected and widespread—and a new way of caring for the mentally disabled. So many revaluations of the culture of the time.

The Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals, Japanese, 17th century

 Similarly, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche created a new secular order based on the activities and attitudes of the warrior, a new approach to social order in the circle of his teaching, a new horsemanship, new flower design (ikebana), a new painting, a new literature.

Powerful teachings tend to expend into cultural areas, to redefine and recreate. Sometimes that is very good. Sometimes, like many other catalyzing impulses, it can be oppressive and can lead to trouble. But it’s there and something to be aware of.

Powerful teachings tend to expend into cultural areas, to redefine and recreate.

Like many teachers, Gurdjieff warned his pupils not to get caught between what he called “two stools.” Not to get caught between the old stool—mainstream culture with its comforts and its validities—and the new stool, the teaching, its view of life, its practices. He warned against getting stuck in the middle. That can easily happen: there are many traps within and surrounding a teaching, like anything human that is vigorously undertaken. This is why valid teachings strongly recommend deep self-study, what Buddhism calls mindfulness, what Gurdjieff calls self-observation or self-remembering. These authentic teachings warn us to follow our experience because, given the novelty and power of a teaching, one can easily blunder into a trap from which they may not emerge. 

What are these traps?

One is the trap of feeling elite. The teaching is really special, these are special people I’m with, the teacher is really special, and so I guess we’re all really special, and everybody else isn’t. What a teaching needs to convey to its participants and what the participants need to understand is that all of this—all of these ideas, all of these practices—aim toward being fully and truly human. A proper teaching connects its participants with all other humans in a more open, sincere, vivid way than if the teaching weren’t there. The notion of elitism is canceled by other notions and convictions: of love, generosity, care, of fundamental sameness. This doesn’t happen overnight. Given our human nature, we have to go through the illusion of elitism to find the way to concern and proper love of fellow humans.

There is another trap for the teachers

The teachers really knock themselves out for the sake of the students, and some of them become very able. They can explain anything. They are larger than life, and they begin to think of themselves as gurus, the elite of the elite. This is a trap. In any proper teaching, the teacher is always a student, and the teacher looking into his or her heart sees the difficulties that remain by virtue of our humanity. The strongest of teachers is a student and recognizes that all the others are his or her teachers.

In any proper teaching, the teacher is always a student, and the teacher looking into his or her heart sees the difficulties that remain by virtue of our humanity. The strongest of teachers is a student and recognizes that all the others are his or her teachers.

Jeanne de Salzmann, who was Gurdjieff’s closest pupil and an extraordinary woman and teacher, said that the teaching requires us to go up the ladder and down the ladder. By which she meant: it’s not just an ascent toward the greater, happier, more conscious, higher, it’s also a descent into the muck of life, into one’s own difficulties, our stupidity, our ignorance. The descent, known and experienced, is part of the teaching. It’s what one needs. Only through that can we be of help to others, let alone to myself.

A teaching offers the treasures

One wouldn’t want to stay in a teaching without treasures. It’s a treasure to be a little more aware of oneself in one’s daily life. It turns life into such an adventure to be more aware of movements in oneself and of the circumstances one finds one’s self in. That is a treasure, and teachings must offer that. There are treasures of understanding when you speak sincerely of some awful thing one has experienced, some shapeless, murky, un-understandable thing.

It’s a treasure to be a little more aware of oneself in one’s daily life.

You ask, “What is this?” And someone capable can take it and show you that it’s part of a larger picture. In fact, without this, there would be no that. And that is wonderful. It is needed. There are treasures of reconciliation and understanding within a teaching. There are treasures of companionship. There are treasures of discernment and wisdom. And joy.

Vaulted walkway

People need not stay in a teaching forever. One can come and go; it’s strictly up to the individual. Some people stay. They stay because it is their spiritual home, they find that they have work to do there, and because the relationships developed there can last for decades, for a lifetime. Participants know each other through all the changes: births, deaths, marriages, remarriages, catastrophes, accomplishments. There are many lives alongside one’s own, and an extraordinary degree of trust.  Michel de Salzmann, Madame de Salzmann’s son and a wonderful teacher whom some of us knew at length, spoke of the teaching/learning community as a tribe—not as a family, but as a tribe.

A teaching has a distinctive energy

Energy is not something that can be spoken of accurately; words are too far from the direct experience of it. A proper teaching, in the “here and now,” begins to support the people who engage. There is a distinct energy. This is a very precious thing. It’s in the body. A good teaching is visceral. It’s in the walls, in the air, something you hesitate to defile. It informs you.

A good teaching is visceral.

Energy is something to be understood in a discerning way, measured and known, not as quantity—many have an abundance of destructive energy—but as quality energy, harnessed and attentive and compassionate.

With any teaching, there is a beginning for each of us. It is often “Abba, tell me a word. Help me with this.” Then, the richness of an authentic teaching opens.