386 — The Evolution of the Student-Teacher Relationship
The student receives so deeply that the very force of their receiving penetrates the teacher and allows the transmission to evolve
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [March 3, 2024] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
Summary: In response to the meta-crisis and the existential risk faced by humanity, we have to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture — to tell a New Story of Value which both integrates the best of the past and is a radically new evolutionary emergent (we include links to three essential books for a deeper understanding, especially for new readers).
This calls for a teacher-student relationship which is grounded in the Field of Value, and honors both the transmission and the Unique Self of the student. In this teacher-student relationship, the teacher penetrates and the student receives, as it should be — but the student receives so deeply that the very force of their receiving penetrates the teacher and allows the transmission to evolve. Thus the student becomes the teacher, and the teacher becomes the student. And there are moments and realms and particular lines of development in which the student may be wiser and more advanced than the teacher; for that moment or in that domain their roles might reverse
This type of relationship is not for everyone; it is post-conventional rather than conventional. It is also radically different both from the university-style transmission of information (where the assumption is that there is no Field of Value) and from the classical Eastern guru-adept relationship, in which the teacher’s higher attainment of True Self gives them authority over the student without honoring (or even recognizing) their uniqueness.
Evolving the source code of consciousness and culture
We are at this moment, in this time between worlds and time between stories, when in order to re-configure Reality we need to participate in what I have called, for the last 15 years, evolving the source code of consciousness and culture.
I remember when I first shared that with Tami Simon, who runs a company called Sounds True, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I was talking about this idea of evolving the source code, and there was a very, very sharp pushback against this notion. It was really a pushback against the notion that there is a source code, because a source code means there is something immutable.
There is something immutable.
There is something eternal.
There is something that’s unchanging — and then we can evolve that unchanging thing.
We can change and deepen that which is unchanging — and it will remain eternal and yet evolve.
It is a moment of either revolution or death (there is a piece called Love or Die on the One Mountain site, which you can read to really feel this context). If you look carefully at a very good meta-analysis of the state of the world today, which we are doing together with our partners, you’ll see that we are facing the second shock of existence.
The first shock of existence at the dawn of human history was the realization that death is part of human existence. Death is a door between two days, but it is part of human existence.
And then we go through all the stages of human history, and we get to the second shock of existence, which is the realization of not personal mortality, but collective mortality. It’s the potential death of humanity itself. We can call it existential risk, or the meta-crisis.
There is a viable and real possibility that humanity, as we know it, will, over the next decades or hundreds of years, actually cease to exist. There will be another extinction. There have already been six extinctions for various reasons, but this one will be generated by the exponential power of technology, unmoored from wisdom, unmoored from the Field of Value, unmoored from interior sciences — this radical split between interiors and exteriors at the very in fabric of existence.
How many of you have heard me say this before? Pretty much everyone.
But we have to re-contextualize and locate ourselves every week, because it’s very easy to look away, so I say it again, in one form or another, every week — in order to locate myself, to locate us, to orient the compass of the revolution.
What are we doing?
This is not a Jesus church. This is not a little mystery church for nice and beautiful spiritual experiences. That’s not what this is.
There are places for that. There is a place for Jesus. There is a place for the Christ. There is a place for Atman is Brahman. And there is a place for Ma’at, and a place for Geist, and a place for Adonai Hu Ha Elohim. There is a place for the modern versions of the old religions.
But that’s not what we are doing. Those all have a place, but we are attuning to the essential allurement of Cosmos today.
The essential allurement of Cosmos is this desperate need for a New Story of Value that responds to the second shock of existence and allows us to navigate that second shock.
A New Story of Value that can walk us through this eleventh hour of human existence, through this time between worlds.
A New Story of Value that emerges in this time between stories, and actually changes the game.
We always refer back to the Renaissance, because the Renaissance was also a time between worlds and a time between stories — between the premodern political, economic, social, religious world, and what was going to emerge as the modern world. While most of Florence — there were nine other families in Florence, besides the Medici — is concerned with Florentine politics, Ficino, da Vinci and the whole gang were able to see around the corner, and they began to tell a New Story of Value. That New Story of Value birthed modernity. And to the extent that they got the plotlines right, they birthed what Habermas called the dignities of modernity. And to the extent that the plotlines were lost, the disasters of modernity became the causative forces of existential risk.
Social synergy is not enough
My dear friend and evolutionary whole mate, beloved Barbara Marx Hubbard, was teaching about the win/lose metrics as a core generator function of existential risk.
She didn’t call it a generator function. My dear friend, Daniel Schmachtenberger, uses this term. But Daniel and I were deeply impacted by Barbara. Barbara got this win/lose dimension. It wasn’t her original teaching, it was the insight that she ran with — that this win/lose metrics is at the core of everything.
Let us now add to it that. The win/lose metric stands against social synergy. And social synergy means that we can identify what’s already working worldwide and bring it together. That was Barbara’s understanding. Barbara’s understanding was that we need to generate social synergy — because without that, we are going to collapse, because our systems are complicated and therefore fragile.
When Barbara and I met, Barbara had already articulated this notion of win/lose, and this notion of social synergy, which would stand against complicated systems. She got that deeply. And Daniel, Barbara and I sat down and did a deep talk on the future human. Barbara had laid that ground down, but it didn’t work. It was true, but partial. And then, Barbara and I started studying.
She did what was called Holy of Holies with me, which is this deep process of interior study, where we go into the source code. Barbara was more delighted, more open, more alive, more curious, more filled with audacity and humility than any 83-year-old that I’ve ever seen, and we spent five years in deep study, where I began to talk about intimacy, and value, and Eros, and the Field of Value.
Social synergy is not enough. Barbara lived in this world of techno-optimism. My friend Ken Wilber was also originally a techno-optimist, but he later shifted his course very dramatically and beautifully. Originally all of us were all techno-optimists. We believed in the social potential of the internet.
But in the end, it doesn’t hold. In the end, it breaks down. In the end, the internet is generating a Skinner’s box, which seeks to control us with invisible technologies and is tightening its vise around the way we think, breathe and feel. If you think that’s not true, and you are 62 years old or 63 years old, take a look at a 10-year-old. Take a look at TikTok. Take a look not at the world that you grew up in, but at the world that the next generation is growing up in.
Barbara and I spent five years deep in Holy of Holies, talking about Eros as Value, about Unique Self, about First Principles and First Values, and about CosmoErotic Humanism — this New Story of Value, which integrated all of the Dharma thinking that we engaged in together, all the Dharma thinking that I had done for the last 20–25 years.
Every time I encountered a Dharma problem, I tried to solve the problem.
True Self thinking was inaccurate and limited, so I tried to solve it, and understand the depth of True Self, but then originate a new understanding called Unique Self, and Evolutionary Unique Self, and Unique Self Symphony, which included and transcended True Self and gave us a new story of identity (for a deeper understanding, read the Unique Self book.)
The universe stories we had were limited, the kind of mythopoetic reaches of people like Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme. They were both students of Thomas Berry. Thomas had enormous influence on Brian, who is a mathematical cosmologist and is doing great work, and on Mary Evelyn Tucker. They did this universe story conversation, but it was actually mythopoetic. It didn’t believe that value was real. It stayed with the standard Neo-Darwinian narrative that science has long outstripped.
It didn’t talk about a Field of Eros (see A Return to Eros).
It didn’t talk about First Principles and First Values (see The First Principles and First Values).
It wanted to stay within the postmodern context and mythopoetically talk about a better world.
I realized that and I stepped in and I said, “Let’s articulate a New Universe Story.”
Outrageous Love and Unique Self are evolutionary emergents
We stepped deep into creating a New Universe Story.
It’s not a Kisa Gotami story (although I cite that often), which is about cultivating compassion.
No, it’s an Outrageous Love story — and although I cited Tagore and Dante, we are actually talking about something new.
It is a new emergent.
It is this very unique emergent called Outrageous Love.
This Outrageous Love — Eros — is the very core of Reality. It is throbbing, and it includes sexuality, and includes desire.
It is something beyond what Dante was talking about, although he was referring to a glimmering of it. It is definitely beyond what the Buddhist stories were talking about, although we include something from the Buddhist stories.
But that’s not what it is. It’s something new.
Yes, on the one hand, we want to locate it in this very large lineage, including all of the premodern versions, and all the modern versions. But on the other hand, we are creating something which needs to be created and that’s actually startlingly new. It is an evolutionary emergent.
Ken Wilber and I had a long talk about the Unique Self.
I was looking for earlier sources for the Unique Self in the great traditions, whether in the Ten Ox Herding Picture in Buddhism, or Sahaj Samadhi in Kashmir Shaivism. That’s all true — and it’s radically evolving. It is a radically new evolutionary emergent.
This brings us to the question of teacher-student. I want to talk about it for a couple of minutes, but I want to set the context.
Who are we?
Where are we?
What are we doing?
- We are aware that we are in a time between stories and time between worlds.
- We want to actually do something about it. We’ve said that in order to actually shift and change and reconfigure and evolve our world, so that it doesn’t collapse in the meta-crisis, we have to evolve the source code.
The collapse would mean —
- billions of lives lost in the present,
- trillions of unborn babies in the future,
- and all the projects of the past unfinished.
It will first hit the most disadvantaged among us — not those of us living in comfortable homes in middle class or upper class environments. The first two billion people to die and suffer are likely going to die in heat waves in India, which are very possible. Two million people could die in two weeks!
That’s what we are doing here: we are trying to avoid this suffering of billions, and bring as many human beings (and then other beings, beyond human) into the circle of Eros, the circle of Love.
We have to evolve the source code. We have to change not just the infrastructure of Reality, not just the social structure, the governance structures — but the basic story in which we live. We call it the superstructure, but there are many names for it.
We have got to change culture itself.
We have to evolve the source code of culture.
We can’t just claim new paradigms and declare them. We have to work so crazy hard, and go into the source code itself, and work with religion, and integrate the best of religions into a new grammar, and integrate the best of systems theory, and chaos theory, and complexity theory.
We need all of the insights from all of the fields. From across mathematics, and across chemistry, and across molecular biology, and across the fields in sociology, and across the eleven or twelve fields of psychology.
We need to integrate it in a story —
- that you can tell to a group of sixty truckers any place in the world,
- that I can tell to an eight-year-old,
- that can actually pass muster at the most sophisticated and evolved Jesuit Academy.
A story that includes and transcends the best, but is also an emergent.
We can’t hide. We have to be courageous. We have to claim the emergent. We can’t just hide it — and now we’re claiming it. Unique Self, hosted in the Unique Self Institute, is a major emergent. It’s the best tool we have to understand who we are that merges all the theories of identity of Eastern and Western enlightenment in a new synergy.
The root cause of existential risk is global intimacy disorder
When Barbara and I were doing those five years in Holy of Holies, we said that it was not enough to say there is a win/lose metrics and that we need social synergy to respond to it, although those are both enormously important.
That’s a great start. That was Barbara’s start.
And Daniel’s articulated and picked up pieces of that when he talks about the generator functions of existential risk. But it’s deeper than that.
Daniel and I had many talks about this back in 2014, and Barbara and I talked about this incessantly between 2014 and when Barbara passed in 2019: there is a deeper root cause to these generator functions of existential risk.
The deeper root cause is a global intimacy disorder.
I know it gets garbled for people, and I can feel the garble, and I want to clarify this.
You’ve got these two generator functions:
- Win/lose metrics. Rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics.
- That generates complicated systems, and things break down.
We need to move towards what Barbara called social synergy — but you can’t move towards social synergy unless there is intimacy, which is why we said the underlying root cause underneath these generative functions is a global intimacy disorder.
Again, I can feel different people hearing it, even people who have known me for ten years, they think they know those words, and then they stop thinking. And then there gets to be a tired repetition around the way we even repeat it to ourselves.
No, it’s got to be completely fresh, completely new. You, we, as the revolution, we have to re-understand it, re-engage it every day. That’s why feminism did consciousness raising groups. That’s why deep changes in society were being talked about in the cafés of Paris (And by Paris, I mean all over the world). If you’re not talking about it at a café, if you’re not thinking about it when you go to sleep, if it’s not causing a conflict between you and your beloved, then it’s not real.
We got to actually feel this, to actually find it.
What do we mean when we say there is a global intimacy disorder underneath?
First, if we are in win/lose metrics, you can’t have intimacy, because I’ve reduced you to an “it”. You serve me. You are instrumental to me. You may even be my partner, but you are still instrumental. We are not really intimate with each other.
Now, to know what that means, we need to know what intimacy means.
Intimacy is shared identity in the context of otherness, with mutuality of recognition, and mutuality of feeling (pathos), and mutuality of purpose (telos), and mutuality of value.
But if we are in win/lose metrics, there can be no shared identity.
Second, the win/lose metrics creates the opposite of synergy. Synergy is separate parts creating larger wholes. That’s new intimacies.
Synergy is just another word for intimacy.
But you can use social synergy your whole life and not get it. When Barbara and I first started talking about intimacy, Barbara’s like, “Why are we talking about intimacy?” And we did this very deep, beautiful dive together. We impacted each other greatly and had a gorgeous, gorgeous ride. But one of the things that became clear was that synergy is just another word for intimacy. Synergy means separate parts come together into a new whole, which has a shared identity in the context of otherness. That’s what synergy means.
Complicated systems are systems in which the parts don’t know each other; therefore, they are fragile. The supply lines are not connected to their end customers. For example, each country and each company and each vector in the international market is vying for its own success, but there is no sense of a larger whole and the telos of a larger whole. We don’t realize the larger whole has a direction.
- I don’t participate in a larger whole.
- I don’t try and align myself with the plotline of the larger whole.
- I pull only for my limited success.
- I’m a short-termer.
- I can’t see future generations.
- I’m stuck in the myopic tyranny of the superficial present.
The myopic tyranny of the superficial present creates fragile systems that optimize for efficiency, not for resilience, for profit, for windfall profits — not for thriving. And then, you leave billions of people out of the safety net. You create polarization, which becomes one of the major vectors of existential risk.
So, there is a root cause, a global intimacy disorder.
In order to make that real, we need to understand what intimacy is, so we defined intimacy.
But then we need to understand that intimacy, and Eros, and uniqueness — these are Values of Cosmos. These are First Principles and First Values. These are the mathematics of intimacy of Cosmos. Unless we have a shared Story of Value, we cannot be intimate with each other. Can’t be done.
When we find that rare moment in life, we find some new person close to us, we realize: Wow, we have a shared Field of Value. It’s not shared values. We are in the Field of Value together.
If we are not in the Field of Value together, we can’t be intimate. We realized that the global intimacy disorder is rooted in a breakdown of the Field of Value, in the sense that we’ve stepped out of the Field of Value.
These are hard-won insights, and we have to get it again and again, so it doesn’t become jargon. It’s deep.
Teaching as lovemaking
Now, within that context, what is the teacher-student relationship?
In this recapitulation we just did, I wasn’t teaching this. I was just evoking it.
In other words, I was assuming that we’ve talked about this for a decade, but we have to evoke it again, and put the pieces together. I wasn’t presenting it in a way that I would to someone who had never heard this, but I was trying to evoke its depth.
But to evoke its depth is different from repeating. And I want to say this tenderly, but even some of the people closest to me, they start repeating. You can’t repeat! Don’t repeat! Go, and learn it, and know it again!
That’s what we have to do in love. We have to fall in love again every day. We have to fall in love with each other.
We have to fall in love with the Dharma.
We have to fall in love with First Principles and First Values.
We have to fall in love with the distinctions anew, again, originally, every day. Life goes insipid, life goes flaccid, non-erotic and non-intimate, life becomes desiccated, dry, inert, when we repeat. It doesn’t matter whether I am repeating “I love you” or “I think I’ve heard that before.”
I am going to tell you one of the gifts that a student gives a teacher. Let me give you just something from a teacher’s perspective.
What is a great student?
A great student listens in a way that they are not thinking, “I got that. I know that. You’ve said that.” If they do, then they never grow. And then, literally inside my interior, I get limp. I lose my access to the center. It doesn’t matter whether the student is 90 years old or 8, that’s not the point; it’s about someone who is receiving — but in the nature of the receiving, you get loved open. The exchange of teacher-students is always making love. It has nothing to do with sexuality, but it’s always lovemaking. That’s how it’s described by the lineage. It’s always zivug.
What the student has the capacity to do is to receive so deeply that the teacher gets loved open (and in making love, the receiver is always fully active) — and that allows the teacher to enter so deeply that the student gets loved open.
That’s what I meant when I said, “The teacher becomes the student, the student becomes the teacher.”
In the classical model, the teacher is dukra, the teacher is penetrating. And the student is nukva, the student is receiving. That’s the classical model. That’s a lot by itself. That understands teaching not as sharing of information, but as this great act of cosmic Eros performed in the space of mind and heart. Teaching is cosmic Eros performed in the space of mind, heart and the transmission.
The teacher tries to stand in the Field of Value — in the Tao.
The teacher tries to embody the Field of Value — the intrinsic, inherent (= not socially constructed) telos of Reality.
The teacher, if they are real, should have genuine attainment in the Field of Value — even as they are imperfect, and flawed, and subject to making mistakes, and can receive feedback.
That’s all true.
And the teacher should have some genuine level of attainment.
You should feel them standing in the forever Field, in the Field of Value. You want to know that the teacher is willing to die for Truth, to die for Goodness, to die for Value. You want the teacher not to be making up their own “take on Reality.” You want the teacher to be actually receiving in the Field of Eros, in the Field of She, in the Field of the Intimate Universe, and then trying to discern distinction in that Field, and then to penetrate the student with those distinctions.
The teacher’s fully active and the student’s fully receiving, but then it switches.
How does it switch?
It switches because in the nature of the students’ receiving, they actually penetrate the teacher. There is this dramatic penetration, and that loves the teacher open, then the teacher opens into the wider Field in an entirely different way, in an entirely different way.
Let me give you one example.
I had a teacher who passed away, and I’ve had nothing to do with him for 40 years because I left the classical system of orthodoxy that he taught. But I used to listen literally to every word he said, and then I would review every word he said, then I would review it again, and again, and again.
And then, every time he talked about the same thing, I would be more ecstatic than I was the time before — because I could learn, from the way he said it again, some new nuance.
Even after I left the system that he taught, I tracked everything he did and everything he said because I knew that he was in the Field of Value, and listened to him again, and again, and again, and again — because I wanted to hear everything.
I didn’t say, “Okay, I‘ve got this. I’ve got what he said.” No, no, I opened myself up again, and again, and again. And during the time when I knew him, he would always be excited to share something with me because in the way that I listened to him — I was receiving it so deeply that he would, in some sense, know it better because he realized that, in some sense, I was penetrating him with my receiving.
It is not listening in a way where there is this kind of subtle egoic structure at play. You can literally feel that. Sometimes I’ll talk to someone who I love madly, but their egoic structure is so at play that even though they don’t realize it, they just stop listening. And then I go dry. I can’t feel it. I can’t feel the Eros. I can’t feel the Field.
There is this exchange where the teacher becomes the student, and the student becomes the teacher. That’s what happens in lovemaking. It’s why the teacher-student relationship is lovemaking.
Teacher-student relationships and the Unique Self
To recap:
- First, both the teacher and student are in the Field of Value.
- Two, the teacher wants to transmit to the student a discernment, a set of discernments in the Field of Value.
But this is not what happens in most teacher-student relationships.
We have teacher-student relationships, let’s say in the university, where the assumption is:
- There is no Field of Value. There is no Field of Value — that’s the assumption of the Western liberal academy, of the entire university system world over, both in closed societies and in open societies. Wrong, for lots of reasons. We’ve talked about how we need to re-vision the Field of Value in this book, First Principles and First Values.
- The teacher is at best transmitting bits of information. The teacher’s job is to transmit a body of unique information that they have to the student. That’s one form. In that sense, there is actually no hierarchy at all between teacher and student. The teacher happens to have a piece of information, they give it to the student.
That’s it. That’s one possibility. That’s legitimate. Those relationships should happen. That is a form of a teacher-student relationship. And that’s good. That’s fantastic. That should exist. But that’s not what we are talking about. It uses the term teacher-student, but it’s talking about something entirely different.
Second possibility, which is the more classical possibility in the East, is that the teacher has this deep attainment of enlightenment, but enlightenment is usually not identified properly with Value. It is enlightenment is this deep sense of the Field of Oneness, which tells the person that their true identity is: I am not just separate, I am part of the Field of Oneness, which is true and good and beautiful.
That’s great. And the teacher has more of that realization. The teacher is in some sense more enlightened. They are claiming they have more attainment of enlightenment (as they may well do). They try and share that experience of enlightenment with the student. The teacher has more enlightenment, or more what we call, in the formal language, more True Self. My True Self is that I’m part of the One. I’m part of the singular that has no plural. That’s how we are using the word True Self.
The teacher has more True Self, so they say: Because I have more True Self, I also have authority over you. The teacher begins to assume authority over the student. Authority per se is not bad, but then the teacher assumes authority over dimensions where the teacher should have no authority, and it collapses.
That doesn’t work because the student is not just oneness or consciousness, the student is a unique expression of consciousness. The teacher can’t have more uniqueness than the student has — if I realize that I am not just True Self, but I am actually Unique Self.
Unique Self is not just the talent of my separate self.
- Level one, separate self: skin-encapsulated ego.
- Level two: I’m not just separate. I’m part of the one True Self.
- Level three, Unique Self: I am a unique expression of the Field; the Field is seamless, but it’s not featureless.
By the way, seamless but not featureless is not a quote from Whitehead. No, it’s a very unique way that we say things in CosmoErotic Humanism. I originally read a version of this in a several-volume epic by a guy named R. H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics. That’s where this phrase came from, but we are doing something new and original with it. We are using it in a particular way.
In his Zen Classics book, he was using it in a very different way, but not unrelated, which is why I brought it to bear. But we are using it in a new emergent way:
The Unique Self is seamless but not featureless.
I am a unique expression of this Field, but this Field is not just this field of consciousness, it’s a Field of Value, a Field of ErosValue. It’s a Field of ErosDesire, Intimacy, Value, and I’m a unique expression of that Field of ErosDesire, Intimacy, Value.
If that quality exists in a human being, that’s unique in the person, so the teacher can have no authority over that.
The teacher is still transmitting to the student. There is still a natural, appropriate, holistic hierarchy of attainment in which the teacher is sharing. There are both —
- this full egalitarianism in terms of power, everyone has their own individuated autonomy, and
- the transmission, and this sense in which the teacher is what’s called the dukra, which is an active penetrating force, and the student is the nukva, a receptive force.
Autonomy and communion in teacher-student relationship
There are moments when the student may have some original piece of information, original insight that they share with the teacher and in that moment, the student actually becomes the teacher, which is beautiful, but not because they just made something up.
It’s one of the conversations Barbara and I always had. Barbara would say to everyone, “Oh, that’s your Dharma, that’s beautiful,” but she didn’t really mean it. It was a way of just facilitating people. And Barbara and I really got to this deep understanding, “No, no, you can’t just say something.”
You have to spend your whole life force, you have to fully receive, fully honor, and appropriately cite, the places where you received pieces, a sentence here, and a sentence here, and a sentence here. The text is: anyone who says something in the name of the person who said it brings redemption to the world.
It’s not that it’s all flowing through us. Well, it is all flowing through us — but there are unique places where we actually receive this very deep, and very broad, and very real, and very beautiful original penetration. I’ve got to receive that. Then, once I’ve received that, then I might have something new to say, or I might have the same thing to say, but I’ll say it in a unique quality of intimacy. I might have something new to add to it, or I might say it just through my being in a way that’s so special, and so beautiful, and so original.
I’ll just give you an example. Yesterday I was doing a Holy of Holies with Ted. And he shared with me a podcast that he did, in which he was literally saying the Dharma. I actually heard him say the Dharma. He wasn’t adding to it, but it was also completely original and fresh. And I was super proud of him. It was original and fresh, because it was going through Ted-ness. And I could feel a whole expansion of the Dharma that could happen through Ted-ness that couldn’t happen through anyone else, because he had actually put his egoic self aside. By putting his egoic self aside, he then emerged in his full uniqueness of presence.
It’s a very subtle thing. It all happens here in this place. The teacher-student place is this place in which we are in this Field of ErosValue together. It’s beautiful.
- We are in this Field of ErosValue together.
- We are all equal in the Field. We all have a unique expression of the Field. There is full egalitarianism in terms of everybody’s fundamental Value. That’s all real.
- And then, we all have different roles to play in the Field. In this incarnation, there are teachers and students, and in a different incarnation, that might change. But in this incarnation, there is a teacher-student relationship.
If I take someone as a teacher, I’ve got to go all the way with that — not to give them authority over me in places where it’s inappropriate, not to give them any authority over me in terms of the decisions I make in my life — and yet, to be impacted.
We should be impacted.
We are not just autonomy. We are also communion. We are intimate communion. And when we’re in the Field of Value together and looking at a shared horizon together, then we listen to each other.
A teacher should have an impact on a student — and a student should have ultimate autonomy and ultimate power. The teacher should always bow to that power, and always bow to that autonomy, and always bow to the independent integrity of their decision making.
That should always be true.
Teachers should never arrogate any power over the decision making of a student.
Ultimately, the student always has to choose.
A teacher should be a radical devotion to the student. The teacher and student should be in radical devotion to each other, and they should be in devotion together to the Field of She, to the Field of Value.
And there is transmission, transmission is real. And there is penetration, and then there is mutual penetration — and we love each other open. In other words, it’s this very, very, very, very deep and subtle, deep and subtle play. And there is an enormous possibility open in the teacher-student relationship.
From the conventional to the post-conventional
I want to make it really clear: the depth of teacher-student relationship that I’m describing is not for everybody. What I just described was not a 101 course, it’s an advanced course.
What I described is not what I would suggest as the model for every place, but that’s what is possible. I’m not suggesting this is what should happen every place, everywhere. I’m not suggesting that at all.
In general, for most people, most of the time, very clear delineations work.
We should circumscribe teachers.
We should empower students.
We should probably not have dual relationships, and not have blurred roles, et cetera.
That’s all generally true — for most people, most of the time. And then we get to a place where that is not enough. That’s just not true. And we move from the conventional to what Kohlberg calls the post-conventional, and then new possibilities open up.
This is not for everyone. I’m not suggesting this for everyone.
This is for a particular developmental structure of consciousness, for people who want to take their unique risk in Eros and Love, and actually become part of a Unique Self Symphony, and speak into the meta-crisis, live into the meta-crisis.
Not: it’s a hobby.
Not: I am trying to establish myself, and paper over my emptiness, and my frustration, and my anxiety, and my rage, and my anger at all the times of my life by propping myself up in some egoic way in the world.
If that’s what you’re doing, this is the wrong place. And everyone is doing that a little bit. We are all holy and broken Hallelujahs. That’s okay. But there’s got to be something more powerful and something deeper at play.
What we tried to do now is to move the source code, to find each other, to establish the Field together.
I hope everybody felt, or at least most people, that I wasn’t talking at you. I was just trying to feel with you, and find my way with you.
The depth of “thee” creates “me”, which creates “we”, and then we create each other, and we find each other in the symphony. It happens on so many levels.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Key Concepts and Further Reading (for new readers)
What do we mean by the Field of Value?
If you’re familiar with Eastern thought, one of the words they use, which I translate as the Field of Value, is the Tao. But another word would the field of intrinsic (not socially constructed), inherent telos. Telos means it’s got direction. It’s going somewhere. There’s a plotline.
Reality has intrinsic, inherent plotlines. It’s going somewhere. Just like mathematical values or values of the exterior world, the interior world has intrinsic, inherent values. We wrote this entire book called First Principles and First Values.
What does Eros mean?
There is a book called A Return to Eros. But just in a word, Eros, which applies across all the sciences and all the social sciences — the level of matter, the level of life, level of mind — Eros is the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. That’s what we call the Eros Equation.
Further reading for deeper understanding:
There is a Unique Self book, book one.
Book two is A Return to Eros.
Those two books are core.
And then book three would be First Principles and First Values, which I would actually read afterwards.
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