Do You Need a Teacher or Guide for Meditation?

Do you need a teacher or guide for meditation? This is an important question that interests many people—and one that people take advantage of.

I recently shared an example: a woman I know went to someone to have her natal chart drawn up. The woman she visited asked how she meditated and then told her, ‘You're doing it wrong. Come to me, and I'll show you.’ That is an offer to have a particular guide for meditation.

So do you need such a person at all? If you do, what kind of person should it be? And what will they do?

In the modern world, and over the last 200–300 years, we can say with certainty that the era of working through teachers has changed. Someone very close to me used to say that this is no longer the age of teachers, that a teacher is no longer needed.

In one discussion, I made the following point: this idea is often misunderstood. What do I mean by misunderstood? People assume that if someone says, ‘A teacher isn't needed,’ it means there should not be a specific individual called a teacher.

Before we turn to the idea of a meditation guide, let us look at what a teacher is. This is a very important aspect. Who is a teacher? And what does it mean to say that ‘people today do not need a teacher’?

In fact, 5,000–7,000 years ago—depending on the era, even in the age of Atlantis—gods came to some people and conveyed knowledge. Moving forward in time, all the way to the Egyptian era, gods entered human beings and conveyed information to people. If we look at people in Egypt, we see a very clear understanding: people had past lives. They were not fully aware of them and could not fully see them, but special incarnations—very powerful spiritual beings—would enter other people and convey some of that information.

Why was this done? So that a person could receive, from outside themselves, the impulses they needed for their next step, their development. Christ's arrival on Earth brought an energy that came to live within every person, allowing them to gain knowledge and reach true, genuine development from within themselves.

When we say that ‘a teacher is not needed,’ people need to understand that this is not about a person who explains things. It means that a human being has gained the possibility of coming to know everything and becoming that true light, that solar energy themselves—not now, but later, in the future—by seeing it within themselves.

At the same time, there are still people today who help others with their own development. Human beings are made in such a way that they develop through interacting with other people. Even in Vedic astrology, there is a concept that defines the interaction between two people: who serves as a teacher for whom, to what extent, and in which areas one person is a teacher for another.

It is no coincidence that a person develops at every moment by observing everything happening around them. Sparks of consciousness and awareness can come from all sorts of aspects of life, even the most unremarkable.

• Simply noticing a particular car while driving can bring a moment of insight. So, speaking abstractly, a tree, grass, or any other car can become a teacher. That is one side of it.
• On the other side, since everyone interacts, an important, subtle aspect arises between people: they start calling others teachers as a social designation. ‘This person is a teacher to many.’ Or, ‘This priest in the church is a teacher to many.’

There are teachers in schools. How is a schoolteacher different from a teacher of spiritual practices? They are a teacher too. So what does ‘a teacher is not needed’ mean? If everyone goes to school or college, listens to managers, and takes courses, what is this belief that supposedly no teacher is needed for spiritual development?

A great many people have no problem with programming teachers, although these days people are starting to find fault with them too. When I studied programming 25 years ago, that did not happen: there was an instructor, and you listened. Yes, you might say they were out of date, but if they offered relevant knowledge, you listened. Now people are starting to find fault even with that. Still, people criticize programming teachers less than they criticize teachers of spiritual development.

In spiritual development, it seems that a teacher is required to have had ‘something special happen to them’ in order to become a teacher. This gives rise to the idea that there should either be no teacher at all or only one. In meditation, this then gets linked to the idea of a guide: there is a teacher or a guide.

Let us turn to the idea of a guide.

When people speak of a meditation guide, they tie that person to the meditation, describe them as connected to 15 generations and ancestral lineages, and offer all sorts of descriptions. In most cases, when you get involved in this, you cannot even verify it. You cannot reach that level and confirm those descriptions for yourself.

But broadly speaking, there is a guide. What does a guide do when you arrive? They lead you somewhere—into a space you may or may not feel, may or may not be aware of, may or may not believe in. Something may or may not happen in that space. Perhaps they are leading you somewhere, and perhaps they are not. So what is actually happening? Are they leading you somewhere or not? What is happening in reality? Or is it the shared space of the people present at the meditation that is guiding you? What exactly is going on?

If a guide is leading you somewhere, you need to tell yourself honestly at that moment, ‘I do not know where.’ If you do not know about or understand this subject, you need to acknowledge that.

I have met a great many people to whom I said, ‘This person is a seer,’ or ‘This person is a guide.’ And I always asked, ‘Let's be clear about this. You were in a particular space—what kind of space was it? What exactly did you see there?’

Some people visited me a while ago who had been on a retreat. They said, ‘We attended a gathering, and the person showed us this incredible golden space.’ My immediate question was: what was that golden space? And what does it mean that they showed it to you? In the material world, the distinction is obvious. There is a big difference between these things:

• Being shown a painting worth a million dollars and being given it.
• Being shown tea and having it poured for you and tasting it.
• Being shown a sandwich and eating it.
• Or being shown a real sandwich, a plastic sandwich, or a sandwich someone has already tasted—or a film in which someone tastes a sandwich.

Was what you saw a film or reality?

People watch a film and experience emotions, especially if it is a good film. They live through a story that is not actually happening in their lives. Who told you that, in spiritual worlds, you cannot be shown a ‘recording’ of something or a space that does not exist? Films include science fiction and fantasy. But you need to understand that, in the spiritual world, everything is far more complex than in a film. It is not just ‘a television with different genres.’ It is much more serious. And the question is what intentions bring you there.

The person who told me about this encounter with a ‘golden sphere’ lives in the material world. They use the spiritual world: they see it as something useful, a place to spend time, while deciding for themselves what they like and dislike there. Here it is important to understand that when you are told there is a guide, you need to be aware that you are watching something, consuming something, being somewhere, or changing something within yourself without fully understanding what is happening.

For many years, I traveled to Mount Vottovaara in the Republic of Karelia. Our teacher there told us about one space we should not enter. According to him, in that space ‘the deck of destiny is reshuffled,’ and a person's entire path through life changes. At the time, I saw it more as a scary story and an abstraction. But later, as my perception developed, I came to understand what he had meant.

That raises the question: can we enter such spaces or not? And do we encounter them in life without even realizing it?

• When we arrive in Bali, what energy do we encounter? What is this energy at work across the whole island for people who were not born there, for souls that did not incarnate there?
• Or take another example: people arrive, light candles and incense, perform rituals, and say they are ‘driving out bad spirits.’ Are there really ‘bad spirits’ present that need to be driven out? Do the people doing this understand what they are working with and what energy they are interacting with? Should they be interacting with that energy?

Someone is told, ‘Cleanse the space.’ They cleanse it. But does that make the space better or worse? All of these questions matter a great deal when it comes to understanding reality.

And we understand perfectly well that if there are guides in meditation, there are also guides in ordinary life. It is simply that, in ordinary life, a person interacts with them unconsciously.

There are meditations in which you are aware of what is happening. Then there are things people call ‘meditation’ that are essentially just events where something happens. Sometimes those events have no clear meaning. I have seen many cases of people playing instruments, singing strange songs, or uttering complicated phrases that no one can translate.

You look at this and think, ‘How is it different from someone opening a Harry Potter book and reading a page from it?’ How is one person's strike on a frame drum different from another person's? Are you truly aware of the difference, or do you simply believe you understand it?

Look at how many views different meditations and videos get. Why are these particular people being watched? What is happening there? Where is attention directed? You often see people crying during meditations, walking along an ocean shore or through a hall and crying. Is that good or bad? When a person cries, their astral state contracts. Does that necessarily mean the effect is beneficial? Or is it simply another state being activated?

There are a great many questions like this. Take constellation work or hypnosis, for example. Is that meditation or not? Is entering a state meditation or not? And is it under the person's control? In meditative states, people try to enter silence and stop thinking. But what kind of silence is it? Is it conscious silence or simply a shutting down of perception?

Here is the key question: when you are beside a guide, are you still in a state of your own awareness and control, or no longer?

In meditation, a person often seeks a state in which they stop thinking. And that is very important. But then a question arises: if your thoughts have stopped, is that conscious silence, or a state in which some of your perception has simply been taken away?

We know that the exchange between two people is never merely verbal. An enormous amount of information is conveyed through state, attention, and perception. When you listen to someone, what exactly is happening between you at that moment? What connection arises? What is being conveyed?

Just as a shot in a film or an image on a screen can trigger inner processes in a person, something similar can happen in meditative states.

1. On the one hand, meditation expands perception.
2. On the other, a person can lose control.

If you go truly deep into meditation, you will encounter the fear of the personality and the ego: a state arises in which you do not control what is happening.

Recently, someone watched one of my meditations and said they began to lose consciousness and were afraid they would fall. What happened? In fact, the person entered a particular phase in which their psychophysical state reacted with a sense that they might now lose consciousness. So were they losing consciousness, or switching to a different state of perception? In essence, they were losing control.

One of the key aspects of a meditative state is being in a state of having let go of control. On the one hand, expanded perception offers an incredible opportunity to perceive everything as it really is—to truly see, rather than maintain an illusion of control. On the other, it lets you see that you do not control things, including areas that cannot be controlled and move to their own rhythm.

What happens in meditation when you encounter other spiritual beings, or the spiritual beings of other people, is a separate subject.

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