Excerpted from Tawagato Journal

“…Sitting in chairs, couches and armchairs arranged around the room, we were quickly served a first round of chai, cookies and fruits, and Steven and Lee began to talk with each other about the band and Lee’s trips to Europe, about Steven’t work and spiritual process. The conversation was naturally interspersed by long moments of silence which allowed a communication of a different nature as well. There was a tangible mood of communion and spontaneous appreciation for the moment as it was unfolding. Lee was in that space as the embodiment of ordinary mind (a term used in the Zen Buddhist tradition to describe the unencumbered, totally responsive presence of the awakened one). The presence of his Father, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, slowly pervaded the space, and Steven seemed graciously aware of and hospitable to that Force, and even to silently welcome that possibility.

After a while, the other people present began to ask questions. The answers given to two of them were particularly inspiring to me. Someone had asked Steven whether his process of awakening had been triggered by a dynamic of transmission made to him at the time, a good twenty years ago. He answered,”I don’t know. I am not interested in what happened to me twenty years ago. All I know is that transmission is happening right now with Lee, here in this space. That is happening now and I experience it and that is all that interests me right now. Sometimes we place so much of our attention on the past or the future that it blinds us, buffers us to the transmission that is always happening in the moment, and that we could enter in relationship to if we were paying attention in the moment and allowing it to touch us.”

He then began to talk about the relationship between the ‘transmitter’, the person who transmits the immediate, dynamic nature of truth or reality (or the presence of God) and the ‘transmittee’ the person who receives the transmission. His description of the dynamic between these two poles – and his refutal of the actual validity or usefulness of any description, because by definition, this immediate and fully dynamic nature cannot be described without becoming a concept in the mind, a mental object devoid of the very life that it is – triggered another question from a student.

“I have heard that you are critical of the teacher/student relationship and do not believe in its usefulness on the path. Yet your description of the transmitter-transmittee relationship indicates a very fine level of understanding of the nature of that dynamic. In my experience, this level of relationship, which is really the essence of guru yoga, is the highest level of relationship possible to the human being, and when all is said and done, the only real game in town. Nothing else is really interesting that would be below that level of reality. Yet there are a number of people in this culture – and you seem to be one of them – who despite a profound recognition and understanding of the nature of that relationship, choose not to enter into it, and I do not understand the reason of such a choice on your part.”

Steven then explained how he was actually not against the teacher part of the equation, but the student part. I do not remember his exact words, but this is what I understood of what he said then. “Rare are the people who come to the teacher from a desire to live at the level of total love, absolute love. Yet that is what the teacher, the master, offers – the possibility of direct transformational relationship with total love, through his or her transparency to that love and ability to communicate the energetic radiance and needs of that Force. People come to me and want to be in relationship with me as their master, but I do not want them as disciples, because they come to me from the level of mind and are either unable or unwilling to enter the true level of the heart. That level of being is the only level I want to live in. I refuse the trap of entering a relationship of duality, a mind-based dynamic with people, because I believe that as soon as the teacher is brought to that level of functioning, the transmission is lost, the transmission cannot take place, and everybody is stuck together at the level of the mind, of the illusion, of the personal story.”