We know if you want to learn cooking or music or math, you look for the person who’s embodied that: it’s called a good musician or a good cook or a good mathematician. We look for that, it’s really obvious. We can read in books – there’s so much in books these days, and books are written by people – but we know we need the human person in front of us, you know? That makes all the difference.
There’s a nice word we use in the West: mentor. It’s very nice, it’s probably a Greek word – all our fancy words are Greek. What’s the definition of mentor? “An experienced and trusted advisor.” Oh my goodness, do we not need one of them!
In Sanskrit they’re called a guru, but as soon as we hear that word we have a panic attack, you know? We think, “Oh, I’ve got to give up my will, and just do whatever they say, and jump off a cliff if they say to, and do naughty things, and they’re going to abuse me.” We have these bizarre ideas.
Remember, Lama Yeshe said, “The Buddha’s dead.” The Buddha’s dead. We can read his books, we can go back and check all the amazing people between now and the Buddha, but the person we need most is the person right in front, looking like me, sounding like me, who shows me what I can become. This is so sensible.
Even at school, some of us had very special teachers, we’ll never forget them. I’ll never forget Miss Holton when I was five. It was a French convent: the Religious of the Sacred Heart. To little girls, the nuns of course were very severe looking in their black habits, but there were some wonderful nuns, very kind nuns.
But I remember Miss Holton, she was a lay teacher. When I was in elementary class, which is like first grade – you know, babies – Miss Holton was just the general teacher, and I loved her. I don’t know why I liked her – maybe because she hugged me one day!
And she had this perfume, she smelt lovely – maybe my mother didn’t wear perfume. I’ll never forget Miss Holton’s perfume, and she had this bright scarlet lipstick. It would have been in 1949. I’ll never forget Miss Holton. I mean, I just loved Miss Holton, that’s all I can tell you – I remember her vividly.
And even more amazing, when a new girl came, Jane, who became my best friend, Miss Holton put me in charge of her, to take care of her. I felt so proud – because I was always the naughty girl, you see. Anyway, I loved Miss Holton.
Lama Yeshe would say we’re all dying for love. It sounds so sweet to put it that way. We’re all dying for love because we have this dualistic sense of self. So how marvelous to have a person out there who is a worthy object of our heart!
The Buddhist view says that when you eventually become a buddha – this sounds very weird to us – there is no longer a separate sense of self. You’re so vast and so amazing and so blissful and you have such connection with every being and such love and compassion for them. Can you imagine that? How joyful!
Right now we’ve got the neuroses and the virtues. This is the way Buddhist psychology describes it, which is not the way we talk in our culture. We’ve got all the unhappy voices of ego: the unhappy attachment, and then the aversion when attachment doesn’t get what it wants, and all the other dramas.
And then we’ve got the virtues, the good ones: love and compassion, connectedness, and they’re the ones that connect to others in a valid way, in a healthy way. We need the mentor to show us how to develop these parts of ourselves.
If we have more attachment than love, we’ll be miserable, suffering, dissatisfied, always seeing the bad, always getting upset by people, never believing people love me, always wanting more; we’ll always be miserable. And we can see this so clearly in us. It’s very fascinating.
If we’ve got more love than attachment – since we were a little girl even – we’ll be a healthy human being. We’ve got to train that part of ourselves. What better way to do that than to find a valid person out there who is a mentor?
What’s that definition again? It’s beautiful. I want to get the definition clear. It’s a gorgeous definition, it’s a wonderful person to have in your life: “an experienced and trusted advisor.” Well, that is exactly a guru. The word in Sanskrit apparently is “heavy with qualities.”