It is natural for children to look to a father or mother to
guide them and we all have to do this with our parents and then later with
teachers or mentors of various kinds. There is a long tradition of this in
spiritual circles and no shortage of those claiming to have the knowledge their
followers are looking for. This knowledge is often referred to as
‘enlightenment’. As I said it is natural that we do this it is also to be
expected that if people are looking for this knowledge or ‘enlightenment’ then
there will be many who will claim to have this knowledge. There are many areas
of life where teachers are invaluable and this may be true to a certain extent
in spiritual areas. Ultimately though there is a problem and teachers in
spiritual areas may knowingly or not misguide their followers. The reason for
this is that it is not possible to know beforehand if a spiritual teacher knows
what he or she claims to know. Naturally we look for clues as to whether the
teachers claims are true or not. Unfortunately all of these clues require belief and it seems to be true that if
we are looking for something then we have a vested interest in believing things
to be true that may not be true. Also a teacher is also unable to know that he
or she is actually enlightened without believing it is so. Teachers may also
look for clues as to whether they know or not but as with followers this is
always dependent on belief and all beliefs will always be suspect. My
assumptions are that all beings are inherently perfect – what I mean by this is
that all beings are born with consciousness and consciousness is unchangeable
and perfect. The only real problem we could ever have is to believe something
that is not true. There is nothing about consciousness that requires belief and
beliefs have nothing to do with consciousness. Our starting point should be to
trust this knowledge - that we have consciousness and nothing we or anyone else
could ever do can change this. There are no graduations of consciousness there
is just natural pure perfect consciousness and we all have it. The reason we
suffer is that we believe things to be true that are not. Ultimately this is
something we all have to find out for ourselves, no one can really teach this
because all teachings require beliefs and beliefs are actually the problem.
Childhood's end is the point where we become responsible for our own beliefs and
do not look to others to correct them.
