Do You Need a Teacher or Guide for Meditation?

AVAlexander Volchek

I want to continue our discussion of meditation with a video on this question: “Do you need a teacher or a guide for meditation?” It is an important question that interests many people—and, again, one that people take advantage of. I recently gave this example: a woman I know went to have a natal chart prepared. The person preparing it asked how she meditated, then said, “You are doing it wrong. Come to me, and I will show you.” Essentially, she was proposing a particular guide for those meditations. A particular guide. So do you need such a person at all? And if you do, who is this person? Who are they? What will they do? That is the question we will examine today. In the modern era, over the past two or three hundred years, we can certainly say that the age of working through teachers has changed. Someone very close to me, who was also a teacher to me, used to say, “This is not the time for teachers. A teacher is no longer needed.” In one discussion, I said that people often misunderstand that idea.

What do I mean by misunderstand? People think that when someone says a teacher is not needed, there should be no individual person called a teacher. Before we turn to a guide for meditation, let us examine what a teacher is and what we mean by a teacher. This is very important. Very important. Who is a teacher? What does it mean that a modern person does not need one? We need to understand this. What does it actually mean? Five thousand or seven thousand years ago, depending on the era—even in the age of Atlantis—gods entered some people and conveyed knowledge to others. As time went on, right up to the Egyptian era, gods entered people and conveyed things to others. If we look at people in Egypt, they had a very clear understanding that they had lived previous lives, although they no longer fully perceived or saw those lives. At the same time, special incarnations occurred: very powerful spiritual beings entered other people and conveyed some information. Why? So that a person could hear the impulses they needed for their next step, their development—hear them from outside.

When Christ came to Earth, he brought an energy that took up residence in every person and enables them to come to knowledge and true, real development from within themselves. So when people seriously say that a teacher is not needed, we must understand that they are not talking about a person telling you something. They mean that a person now has the possibility of knowing everything and becoming that true light themselves: sunlight, solar energy. Not now, but later, in the future, becoming that solar energy by seeing it within themselves. To put it simply, seeing it within themselves—though “seeing” is, of course, a figure of speech. Of course, there are still people today who can help you in your own development. Human beings develop through interacting with other people. Even Vedic astrology has a concept—I do not remember which parameters determine it; I am not an expert—for identifying, between two people, who is a teacher to whom, to what extent, and who is more of a teacher. Is person one more of a teacher to person two, or person two to person one?

And in which areas is that person a teacher? Every person develops at every moment by observing everything around them. Sparks of consciousness and awareness come, and can come, from absolutely different aspects of life, even seemingly insignificant ones. You might simply be driving, notice a car, and have an insight at that moment. A tree, grass, or another car can therefore become a teacher—again, speaking figuratively. That is one side. On the other, everyone interacts with other people. This is a very subtle, important point. People begin calling others teachers because of a social role they assign to them: this person is a teacher to many, or this priest at church is a teacher to many. There are also teachers at school. So how does a schoolteacher differ from a teacher of spiritual practices? They are both teachers. What does “a teacher is not needed” mean if everyone goes to school and university—

listens to managers, and takes different courses? What is this belief that a teacher is supposedly unnecessary for spiritual development? Look at all the faultfinding. People are relatively relaxed about programming teachers, although now they criticize them too. It was not like that before. When I studied programming twenty-five years ago, you had an instructor and listened. You might say they were a little out of date, but if they taught something current, you listened. Now people find fault, but they do so less with programming teachers than with teachers of spiritual development. People say something extraordinary has to happen for you to become a teacher of spiritual development. That creates the position that perhaps there should be no teacher, or only one teacher. This is then brought into meditation: the idea of a teacher or a particular guide. Who is a teacher, essentially? Someone who teaches you to be in a particular meditative state. A guide takes you into a particular state. We have now begun to approach and understand the word “teacher.” We have covered only a small part of the subject so that we can move toward an answer.

Let us look at a guide first. Read what people say about guides in meditation: a guide is described as being connected with fifteen generations, ancestral lineages. People write technical descriptions of that kind, most of which you cannot even verify when you arrive. You cannot reach a point where you can reliably check that information for yourself, see whom the guide is connected with or what it means. In general, there is a guide. What does a guide do when you come to them? They take you somewhere, into a space you may or may not feel, may or may not perceive, may or may not believe in. Something may or may not happen to you there. Perhaps they are taking you somewhere; perhaps they are not going anywhere. What is actually happening? Are they taking you somewhere, or nowhere at all? What is really happening? In reality, what is happening—not in your imagination? Or is the shared space of the people attending that meditation taking you somewhere?

What exactly is happening? You need to recognize clearly that a guide is taking you somewhere. At that very moment, you need to recognize and say very clearly, “I do not know where.” If you do not understand this subject, you need to say, “I do not know where.” I have met an incredible number of people who say, “This person can see,” or “This person is a guide.” I always say, “Let us be specific. You were in a particular space. Exactly what space was it?” About a year ago, some people visited me here who had been to a retreat nearby. They said, “We were at a gathering, and the person showed us this golden space. It was incredible.” What was that golden space? And what follows from being shown it? There is a big difference between being taken to see a painting worth a million dollars and being taken somewhere and given a painting worth a million dollars. A big difference. An enormous difference. Everyone understands that in the material world. Being shown some tea is one thing. Having it poured for you and tasting it is another.

Being shown a sandwich is one thing; being taken there and tasting that sandwich is another. There is a big difference. Were you shown a real sandwich, a plastic sandwich, or a sandwich someone else had tasted? Or were you shown a film of someone tasting a sandwich? Was what you saw a film or the real thing? People watch films and experience different emotions, especially when the film is well made. Watching a story being portrayed produces certain emotions. Who told you that, in spiritual worlds, you cannot be shown a recording of something or a space that does not exist? Films include fantasy. Understand that things in the spiritual world are far more complicated than in a film. It is not just a television with different kinds of series. It is much more serious. And what intentions do you bring when you enter? The person who told me about that gathering with the golden sphere generally lives in the material world and uses the spiritual world. What does “uses” mean? They see it as something useful and right, a place they can be, and decide for themselves what they like and dislike in that spiritual world.

So when you interact with someone described as a guide, you need to understand that you are viewing or consuming something, being somewhere, or adjusting something without knowing what. For many years I traveled to Mount Vottovaara in the Republic of Karelia, in the Russian Federation. When we went there, our teacher at the time told us about a space on the mountain that we should not enter. As he explained it, that space reshuffles the cards of your fate. Your fate is reshuffled like a deck of cards, and everything changes. At the time, it was a frightening story and an abstraction to me. Later, as my perception developed, I saw what those spaces were and whether one could enter them. Can we enter spaces like that or not? Do we encounter them in our lives, and do we understand how they work? For example, when we arrive on the island of Bali, what energy do we encounter as we land and spend time there? What energy operates across that island for people who were not born there, for souls that did not incarnate there?

What energies operate there? The important thing is always to understand what is really happening, rather than simply being told a phrase. People worship something, come and light candles and incense. What exactly are they doing? They say, “We are performing a ritual, driving out bad spirits.” Am I right that bad spirits are present here and you are driving them out? People performing that ritual who do not usually live there treat it as something positive. Do they actually understand what they are working with, what energy they are encountering and beginning to interact with? Do they need to encounter and interact with it? What exactly are they doing in that space? Really, honestly, what are they doing? Someone is told, “Cleanse the space,” and does so. Does cleansing it make it better or worse? All these questions matter when studying the theory from the outside. But we also understand perfectly well that if guides exist in meditation, guides exist in ordinary life. You can interact in ordinary life with different people who serve as guides for your spiritual life and development.

In ordinary life, you simply do it without awareness. There are meditations in which you are aware, and there are things people habitually call meditation that are not meditation at all: just events you attend where something happens. Such an event may have no meaning whatsoever. I have seen enormous numbers of them: people playing particular instruments, singing certain songs, or reciting complicated, specialized phrases that others cannot translate. You look at it and ask: how is this different from someone opening Harry Potter and reading something on page fifteen? What is the difference? How does your drumming or playing an instrument differ from that person's drumming or playing? Do you understand the difference at that moment, or are you under the illusion that you do? Do you truly perceive it, or is that perception an illusion? What is actually happening at that moment? Look at the number of views on particular people's meditation videos. Open them and look. There are all kinds of people; you can study why people watch them, what is shown, and what gets the attention.

For example, attention often centers on people crying. They show people wearing headphones, walking by the ocean or somewhere else, or in a hall, and crying—

crying. Is that good? Is that good? Really, is it good or not? When someone cries, their “I” compresses the astral body. Is that really the right effect? Someone says, “Yes, it is a release of psychophysical tension.” Is it definitely right? Is it definitely beneficial? Or does it create some additional space? This is an incredibly interesting aspect of understanding how we experience everything. There is a great deal of this in the modern world. Take constellations, for example. That is an existing approach, yet people do not allow for the possibility that it is meditation. Is hypnosis meditation? Is entering hypnosis meditation or not? If we read the definition of “meditation,” it seems to fit—or does it not, because it is outside your control? Or is it under your control after all? What is it? What happens to a person's consciousness in constellations? Where is it directed? I am explaining this to answer the question about a guide and a teacher. When you are with a guide, are you in command of your state and consciousness or not? In meditation, people try to enter specific states, states of stillness in which they stop thinking. This is very important: a person stops thinking, and their mind becomes quiet.

If it becomes quiet, is that conscious stillness, or is it quiet because your ability to perceive has been taken away while something is happening? What is it? Everyone knows—I hope you know—that when two people interact, whatever they say, an enormous amount of information, states, sensations, consciousness, and consequences arise not from the words but from some transfer of energy, a psychophysical transfer, and so on. Different fields describe it differently; that is not the point. It does not arise from the words. So when you listen to a person, what energy and connection occur at that moment? What particular connection? What exactly is happening? What is flowing between you? It is like a frame on television—the twenty-fifth frame or some such frame—where something flashes and leaves an impression in the subconscious. It was used extensively in the past. I do not know whether it is used now. Does the same thing exist? Does it? This is a very important question. Does the same thing exist within meditative states?

In meditative states, on one hand, you expand your perception; on the other, you lose control. At least, you lose control at the level of your personality. Your personality wants to control everything, but loses control. If you truly enter deep meditation, you will see the personality's fear, the ego's fear. Fear will flood in: you will lose control of everything happening. What is happening, and where are you being taken? Yesterday, someone watched one of the meditations posted on my channel and said they began losing consciousness while watching, even becoming afraid they would fall. What happened? The person entered a particular phase in which their psychophysical state reacted as though they might lose consciousness. Were they losing consciousness or simply shifting into a different consciousness of perception? Losing it or shifting? Essentially, they are losing control. One of the most important aspects of a meditative state is this—this matters greatly—to be in a state in which you have let go of control. Expanded perception offers, on one hand, an incredible opportunity to perceive everything as it really is: to truly see, rather than hold an illusion of control—

and, on the other, to see what you do not control, including areas beyond your control that move at their own pace. We will certainly discuss what happens in meditation when you encounter other spiritual beings or the spiritual beings of other people. There are other spiritual hierarchies, other beings that are not human, of different orders. Encounters with people and spiritual beings are a separate subject that we will definitely discuss.