---------- Forwarded message ---------Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 15:39:15 EDT From: RJspeak@aol.com Reply-To: Stewarts@lists.best.com To: stewarts@lists.best.

com Subject: < RJ&J > Teachers and students ( a longer post) from R J Stewart I would like to contribute my input to this discussion about teachers and students, from the perspective of almost 20 years of teaching esoteric subjects, and more specifically the last 11 years working in the UK and USA, and the 8 years of working with my partner Josephine. Firstly, I find that working with a partner is better than working as a sole teacher. My experiences working with Josephine have confirmed this substantially, and we encourage our newly trained teachers to work in pairs as much as possible (the pair can be male/male, female/female, male/female, aardvark/gerbil). There can be no doubt that many of the major developments in our work are as a result of partners working together, and I am very fortunate to have such a powerful and committed partner to work with. Some of the disputes that have arisen on this List come from a fundamentally flawed and outmoded position: that of the superior (white) male expert, who feels entitled to be an "authority" . This may have been the way of the 19th century, and produced people like Crowley on one hand, and Jung on the other: with Rudolph Steiner occupying an ethereal and intellectually elevated middle ground. It does not work today. The experts who still follow this pattern today are essentially dinosaurs who have not noticed that the comet already hit planet Earth. The comet is that huge change of collective consciousness that has been building for the last 30 or more years, and which will continue to surge into the next century. Alas for poor Jungasaurus, he must evolve into a bird or crumble into the healing earth and be forgotten. Most of the work that Josephine and I do relies on the flow of subtle energies and the opening of inner contacts during workshops: I trust her abilities and years of experience in this, and she trusts mine. None of this is about allowing students to express their problems or encouraging them to be confident: these are all side issues that come After Inner Experience. Our work often involves a tricky balancing act between opening out the power and holding back to find the group resonance of any one event or workshop. Especially in areas where people have been conditioned by therapy into expectations of ego-support, emotion-sharing, and mandatory preconceptions of self-development. None of these play any real part in magical or spiritual work, but we often have to meet people halfway to enable them to get beyond these demonic barriers that have been developed in our culture. As Steiner so aptly describes in his essays, these barriers are encouraged and greatly amplified by the one-on-one process of therapy, and depend on the image of the dominant superior expert (usually male, nowadays often female). It is significant that Steiner formulated his criticisms of psychology before psychology and therapy were elevated to the neo-religious status they have today. I find his essays to be ironically prophetic. So all this stuff about "harming" and "helping" students bears no real

relationship to what happens in magical and spiritual work: I prefer to think of liberating people who work together with us, often working within the interaction of my partnership with Josephine, even when she may not be present. And the Liberation is usually surprising, paradoxical, or even absurd, rather than according to some reductionist plan of the human psyche, a manual of teaching methods, or a system of tricks and ploys to regurgitate and remold conditioned thoughts/emotions The old magical and spiritual traditions have inherently liberating powers within them: they do not need any apologetic rationalization according to psychology. What is needed is participation, hard work, and (of course) an ethical respect for others, rather than a politically, psychologically, or sentimentally correct set of rules or guidelines for teaching. This has been highlighted for us in the training of our teachers over the last 18 months, something that would not have arisen at this time without the partnership between Josephine and myself. The most difficult thing to "teach" is that there is nothing to teach: there is only participation and then change. The medium for this participation and change is Discipline of Imagination. The rest, as Rabbi Hillel said, is commentary. with good wishes RJS --------------------------------------------------------------------------Any problems with the operation of the list - contact: Talon@Sidhe.com [moderator] Please allow several days for a response. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------