Awakening does not turn you into a Buddha, it only does unlock the capacity to “see life” from a new “point of view”. Awakening does not change the nature of your mental, emotional and physical “substance”, the colours and vibrations of the forces and energies that constitute your personality.
The ego does not dissipate magically after awakening, awakening is just the beginning, the post-awakening integration can take a long time.
The post-awakening impulse to share often morph into a desire to teach, it can be a natural move but it can also be a choice driven by the remains of an ego which haven’t fully dissipated more than a real spontaneous impulse coming from Presence.
Awakening does not turn a bad teacher into a good teacher. An ill-equipped mind won’t be able to choose its words very carefully, and they might be misinterpreted. A non-transparent emotional body might radiate a misguiding aura of nihilism, a lack of integration might reveal a poor capacity to adapt to the current vision of the students and to adjust the teaching accordingly, we can all share, not all of us are equipped to teach.
A quick tour of YouTube will reveal a growing number of individuals, mostly coming from “neo” or “pseudo” Advaita, presenting themselves as teachers. Some of them had genuine “experiences”, but most of them are mistaking awakening for realization.
They are offering a takeaway version of spirituality, finely tuned to our world of consumerism, to a crowd of young souls stuck in their egoic loop searching for a quick fix to their craving for an “awakening-lite”.
Those “self-appointed” teachers can be easily detected through their obsessive claims that they have annihilated their ego and that there is nothing left. They are particularly fond of sentences like “there is no one talking here”, “there is no me”, etc. Of course, what they say is not false but their OCB attitude is an indication that they have a poor comprehension of what the “ego” is and no comprehension at all of the process of integration into Presence.
A student that suddenly understand the principles of trigonometry might be very excited about it but it doesn’t suddenly make him a fully-fledged maths teacher, obvious to many not so much for the fans who are gathering in their YouTube video channel or Facebook page.
A growing number of those individuals have started to organize “teaching sessions” in their lounge or bedrooms, often the “teaching” manifest itself as an outpour of spontaneous “beingness” from a consciousness lost in wholeness, often funny, mostly harmless, excessively untamed.
A good spiritual teacher is not necessarily a man of good character and an enlightened man of good character is not necessarily a good teacher, but I do personally give more credits to a good teacher who is a living example of what he teaches.
Until real group consciousness starts kicking in, the compulsive spiritual teaching syndrome is well on its way, soon to a town near you, brace yourself and keep your eyes opened 🙂
Calwen