Obedience

I thought that the post below was good even apart from the original context of the discussion thread.

Patrick Augé writes: Jul 24th, 2009 at 1:18 am

A teacher is a student who teaches in order to continue his study. (Mochizuki Minoru Sensei)

The question is: is our teacher here for us or is he here for himself?

How is his life style? Brand name articles, fancy cars, mindless hobbies and activities, whimsical spouses, secret personal life, etc.? Or did he prepare the proper environment and conditions to continue his study? How does he deal with daily life? Does he tell us what we want to hear or does he tell us what he thinks? Is it obvious that he has his students’ best interest at heart and has been maintaining that attitude in spite of all the model students who have left him for whatever reason?

Is the teacher a unified, integrated person in core ways – at least core in ways that are important to the individual student and the teacher himself? “Unified and integrated” don’t necessarily mean treating everyone the same. I might treat my children differently than I would an adult stranger. I might handle business relationships differently than I would a student-teacher relationship.

Having one’s students’ best interest at heart doesn’t mean giving them what they want, it means giving them what they need, which is often contradictory.

Did he leave his own teacher or was he expelled and avoids the subject or has he maintained the relationship with his teacher and often talks about him without hiding the fact that there were disagreements at times?

Is our teacher a public person, does he make himself available to his students, will he make the time to listen? How are his senior students, the product of his teachings? Is it an unreachable clique or a group of compassionate students who close the gap between our teacher and us? How do they behave when the teacher is away?

Is our teacher a human being? Is he struggling with his weaknesses and does he admit them and work on improving himself?

Those are not the only questions to ask, but they may help in seeing more clearly through one’s emotions.

In all relationships there are problems. Doubt is healthy when it leads to researching the truth in order to make a decision. Doubt is wrong when it becomes the excuse to avoid making a decision. Many students who left their teachers without fully understanding their actions and their consequences end up being treated the same way by their own students. It may go for another generation or so but will die for want of the spirit that ensures the continuation of the lineage.

When the relationship is based on the right reasons, all difficulties become opportunities to strengthen that relationship. Otherwise the slightest problem becomes the excuse for running away from the relationship.

If you decide to leave your teacher over deep disagreement with him, then do it cleanly. Return your ranks, certificates, all that which you received from him. That will be the best expression of your disagreement. Look for another teacher, explain the situation and do not expect any special treatment since you will be considered as a high risk student and will have to establish your credibility, which may take time. That may help you if you later find out that you made a mistake and want to go back to your teacher. But be ready to start again from the bottom.

If your priority is to learn, be unconditional, accept anything, do not victimize yourself.

“Unconditional”. This relates to my thoughts on faith, as I’ve written elsewhere. Many times I’ve seen people whose expectations of teachers were not met or disappointed, maybe even ravaged and shattered. For some of these people, they could not follow that teacher anymore, at least not in any way that requires them to open up their heart to their teacher.

To open up your heart to your teacher and have faith in them does not mean, necessarily, that the teacher will see this and get something out of it. The primary goal and consequence is that you, the student, see more of what the teacher has to offer, and accordingly receive more of the good stuff from the teacher. (Perhaps as a further consequence of this (ie that you are getting it), the teacher may see what is happening and your mutual relationship deepens.)

To have faith in your teacher means to try to see that which they may be clumsily trying to get across to you, that which they may imperfectly be striving to achieve. Maybe the teacher is socially inept, verbally crude, interpersonally sloppy, etc. To have faith means to accept that the teacher might be imperfect and clumsy in some respects, but to recognize whether those imperfections do not fundamentally interfere or obstruct your learning from the teacher. This recognition includes grasping that how and how much you are bothered by those imperfections is your issue – that you yourself are holding yourself back in some ways from learning from the teacher.

To have faith means to be accepting, patient, generous, and open-minded. In the case of relating to a teacher, it helps greatly to have a heart of gratitude and humility, selflessness and devotion. These not only clear away the clutter of your own issues that may interfere with your learning, but in the context of relating to the teacher as another person, they may go a long way to communicating to the other person where you stand and how you wish to relate to him. If you want to be treated as an equal, a customer, a peer, a rival, an advisor, etc. – of course the way you present yourself to your teacher will influence how he sees you and will see fit to relate to you.

Many people in the above forum had strong reactions against excessive obedience, or against obedience in general. There was a similar mentality seen in this thread about burkinis. What is this fear or aversion toward giving yourself over to someone or something?

“Do not victimize yourself”. Does the teacher seem to require you to completely debase yourself in order to relate to you as a student? Does the teacher encourage you to prostrate yourself possibly excessively? Does the teacher encourage you to beware of how you realize humility and selflessness? Does the teacher encourage or guide you to have awareness of your own development? Does the teacher give the impression that you should always trust his opinion over your own? The fear/aversion I mention above, it seems to be indicative a lack of reconciliation of selflessness and devotion with self-awareness and self-actualization. That is, faith, obedience, etc. – the things that would appear to go with selflessness and devotion – they seem to contradict self-awareness and a person knowing how and where he is going, and some level of responsibility for the same.

Seminar – taking stock

• “The Animal” – Clark sensei responded to someone who was basically commenting how it “feels like nothing” when you do the technique and your partner falls down. Perhaps the question was, how do you assess and improve the skill if you can’t feel when you succeed? Clark brought up the concept of the “animal” that we feed with the feeling of success or otherwise working away at something (eg wrestling with someone, overpowering someone). Getting better at technique means becoming able to do technique in a way that doesn’t give you that feedback that “feeds the animal”. Conversely, if feeding the animal is your incentive for practicing, then your technical improvement will accordingly stay at a level at which you can still feed the animal. To move on, you have to starve it.
  An immediate thought I had was how the animal can adapt to different “diets”. And, because the animal isn’t being fed by the initial diet, I might be in danger of feeding it without noticing. This is a question of  internal awareness and introspection, one that could be the biggest one I took away from that weekend. It was one of those “Ag!” moments where I realized I didn’t really understand what my teacher was getting at years ago. I’ve already had a couple of “Ag!” occasions where I thought I understood why Endo sensei was so persistent about the idea of feeling oneself and not being captivated by the partner to the point of not noticing or ignoring the partner.
  My “project” now is to notice the animal’s current diet.
• The value of a group to which you belong, or a “kai”.
  Talking with some of the Jiyushinkan people, I could see on one hand how much they were developing as human beings from their practice because they belonged to a coherent, cohesive group. Belonging entails having a set a values, priorities, relationships, reference points – all of which entail having an identity. Paradoxically, being able to have an identity enables a person to question themselves and thereby grow.
  On the other hand, and this is not a piece that is strictly wedded to being in a group, there is the aspect of “other”. That is, belonging to a group influences how you see people outside of the group and how your experience is when you encounter such people. The main, possibly only, danger lies here, in that that development of “other” could go poorly. Precisely because the danger lies here, a person’s way of mitigating that danger is to initiate encounters with it (ie interact with “others”) and continue to be/become the person he/she is trying to become. So, if belonging to a group involves any related danger, it is to minimize exposure to “other” and increase the possibility of a person’s grasp of “self” and “other” to go awry.
• Premises and assumptions.
  Examining the assumptions that I place myself under in my practice is a good way to contemplate why I am practicing, what I think is important, how I prioritize, what I’m trying to get out of it.
  To start from specifics, I think I don’t value reversals as much as I value absorption and efficient use of energy. I probably value continuity more than intentional acceleration/deceleration. I think I value surrendering myself to my partner’s actions more than consciously deciding or knowing what we are doing from moment to moment.
  I probably value demanding, or encouraging, a pre-decided form to happen by making my own openings rather than my partner’s openings apparent. This could have something to do with boundaries, but particularly when I’m dealing with someone I’m not familiar with or with a beginner, I will be more likely to leave the windows of opportunity open, and close them with people I’m more familiar with and of a higher level. Of course the premise is that I think one dimension of an interaction with a partner is awareness of who they are and when something is being artificially, rather than organically, given/taken. I don’t know if this reflects my attitude on social context or my aikido development.
  Why? Why choose these assumptions? For the first assumption, at the risk of providing an evasive answer, I like “neru” practice. I like the idea of striving for unconscious awareness and accepting whatever comes. As mentioned above, with a higher level partner I can “keep a channel open” for my own agenda (eg attacking and putting them down, or reversing) but it’s not an emphasis.
  As for the second assumption, again at the risk of an evasive answer, I think that that is more in accordance with my philosophy of life at this point. It’s likely also how I’ve “starved my animal”, at least in one way.

Choice

Is choice something that a person gains very simply and suddenly? When a person is told, “You know, you can do that this other way instead – it works better, is more comfortable, healthier, etc.”, does the person automatically have a choice? That choice may be to do the new way. The choice could also be to further learn about the new way in order to do it. And conversely the choice could be to continue doing the old way, with various levels of “traces” of the new information staying in the mind.

Perfection – When the middle way can’t be

I’ve been playing with a question that started forming when I left Seattle a few days ago. It originally felt like the problem of integrating, or deciding on some balance between, two mutually exclusive elements. This led to the heart of the matter: what I want for myself and what I’d like to impart to others ultimately (which are basically the same, as I am one person).

素直 (Sunao), the Student-Teacher Relationship, and Religious Faith

(This is an ongoing draft – the more I add the less organized it gets. For now. 3/25/07)

Sunao – I did not hear a satisfactory definition of this word during my whole time living in Japan. Every definition I heard was along the lines of, “A person who is sunao does what he is told without objecting or complaining.” Although I had the impression that sunao was a word with a positive connotation – a kind of virtue – the definitions I heard all had the sound of obedience, compliance, or other quality that oppressors or superiors would like to see in those who are of lower standing.