Teachers

I bet most people in this network has a sense of a teacher figure. A lot of you have probably had Buddhist masters, some sort of system they followed, or maybe not at all. Well for those of you who have experienced the type of "devotion" Buddhism deems as the highest virtue to do the work of self-awakening, I would like to ask: When is it enough? Rather, when is the teacher and concept of teacher outside oneself get dropped? I ask because often times, being human, those diligent students like ourselves, tend to get entangled in the web of teacher/student relations. The lines get blurred, you get to know them as people, and still they remain on a pedestal of an intangible sort, one so hard to carve out of your mind once its imprinted, that it raises another question: "Do you trust yourself to find the way out of 'darkness?'" And then: "Are you in fact, in the dark?" I raise this question because I have been wrangling with all this. And I have found that through the dark times I encountered, through the feeling of "path abandonment" (where I feel that I had denied my "true" calling - yeah, as opposed to the fake one) as I left my teacher and granted my self freedom from any path, I came to a point of freedom. The path I practiced is irrelevant. The one tenet that is most important to me now is the one that states that even the "teachings" are an illusion. Which is where I am. I dont want a teacher. I want myself to allow myself to accept that fact that I am WHOLE AND COMPLETE ALREADY! And I need nothing to FIX me, because I am not broken. My eyes may be closed according to some religions, but they seem to be pretty darn open right now, and I discovered that I will also find what I will find. I am strong enough to walk my path and in a way I see fit. So I guess this is a calling to the realization that we are all whole. The teacher is also a phase, a phase you may return to several times in your life, or every other week, but there HAS to remain a sense of self. A sense that you will be fine without them there. I agree that we need discipline. Without discipline we will achieve nothing. There comes a time, though, when you must administer your own discipline to yourself. You come alone, you leave alone. And that is not depressing! That is empowering! We are responsible for ourselves, so get yourself together. Be weary when your teacher becomes your crutch. Be a teacher to someone else, and you may discover you know it all already.