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Last night I spent an evening with about forty people at a friends’ home, presenting my research on the Experience of Being. For an hour and a half we watched clips from my interviews and explored our own experience together. Many participants had little or no contemplative background, yet as the evening progressed, the atmosphere became increasingly reflective and attentive.
There were also some challenging, even provocative questions directed at me. Afterward, several people told me how impressed they were by how calmly and wisely I had responded. Some said, “I wouldn’t have been able to handle that the way you did.”
But I think that comparison is misleading. I am not necessarily that calm or wise in ordinary situations. Something different happens when one accepts responsibility for holding a space for others to explore themselves.
The role itself calls forth or activates something in the space-holder.
I came to this realization years ago while writing Spiritual Transmission: Paradoxes and Dilemmas. We usually imagine that a spiritual teacher inherently possesses wisdom, compassion and clarity and offers these qualities to students. But I came to suspect that the relationship works both ways. The students’ trust, seriousness, vulnerability and expectation may evoke capacities in the teacher that are far less available to them in other circumstances.
In that sense, the teacher may actually become wiser in the presence of the students. This doesn’t make the wisdom less real, but it should make us cautious about assuming that the person we encounter in the teacher’s chair is simply like that everywhere and all the time.
Perhaps wisdom is not always something a person has. Sometimes it may be something that arises between us.