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My (Amir Freimann’s) introduction to the book Spiritual Transmission: Paradoxes and Dilemmas on the Spiritual Path is provided here in PDF format. Below is the Epilogue:
When I started seeking spiritually, at the age of 16, spiritual-existential questions were the source and core of my seeking. Who am I? What is all this? What is life for? I felt that, as long as I didn’t know the answers to these basic questions, I was simply wasting my life. I desperately had to find the answers.
Then, at the age of 29, I underwent an event of unitive consciousness and all my questions dissolved in a realization of a different order. In an instant, from a spiritual seeker I became a finder. I saw that those questions were merely pale reflections of the great mystery of Everything. The questions disappeared in that realization, as if in a puff of smoke.
Once the smoke cleared, however, I found that new and just as powerful and meaningful questions, which sprang out of the realization of unitive consciousness, took the place of the old ones. Questions, I realized, were not to be resolved but to be lived; and answers were not to bring an end to questioning, but to allow for old questions to be replaced with new and fresh ones.
Living in a state of questioning, searching and exploring became for me an end, rather than a means to an end; and I’ve been living in that state to this very day.
It is not surprising, therefore, that my exploration into the spiritual teacher-student relationship led me to a similar realization: that the paradoxes and dilemmas, associated with this relationship, are not to be “solved“ but rather to be lived as openly, dynamically and unresolvedly as possible.
In fact, paradoxes and dilemmas are the beating heart of the spiritual teacher-student relationship; and as long as they are vibrantly and dynamically alive, so is the relationship.
This is why I created this book.