Is the Guru an Authority? || Mark Whitwell on the Male Knower
On the balcony of the Palace of the Maharaj in Mysore near where Krishnamacharya taught his famous classes after returning from the Himalayas | Mark Whitwell | Photography by Audrey Billups
You know, I just need some room to uncurl,
I don't have no aim in view, just some dreams to pursue,
As I wallow around in the world—Incredible String Band
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About the Author:-
I don't have no one to cheat, don't have no one to beat,
The goal of the Yoga Teacher is to give the student access to the innate intelligence of their whole body through the breath. Yoga is not about attaining an external intelligence from the teacher or accumulating information within a male knowledge hierarchy. It is each person’s direct participation in the unspeakable beauty and intelligence that is the whole body. The body is the Cosmos: eternity blooming in limitless spherical unfolding patterns of light. The secrets of the universe are in you, as you, already!
The prevailing social patterns of patriarchy and control have devalued the ordinary organic life and imposed dreadful restrictions and trauma on everybody. We came into this life and as innocent babies absorbed the cultural idea that we are separate from Nature and the Cosmos. We were then given disciplines and methods to do on ourselves in order to return to a pure or realized state.
We feel separate and so we get busy trying to know or realize something about life. We become exploitable by teacher’s who claim that they have special keys to the kingdom. As if Truth is not all-pervading in and as every thing and every body but accessible only through a secret code.
This is a cultural mistake.
Sunset in Mysore | Mark Whitwell | Photography by Audrey Billups
I maintain that there is nothing to attain. Nobody is more advanced than anybody else in any measurement system whatsoever and any teacher that is authentic will refuse to sustain the deep cultural assumption that there is a necessary attainment in life: whether spiritual, religious, or cultural. The teacher actively dismantles these logics and behaves in ways to cause the assumption to fall away.
We could say that the guru builds a bonfire and pokes the fire with a stick to make it burn. All the world structures of ‘knowers’ are then put onto that fire. And the stick too. We are free then to go to the beach with our friends.
My dear teacher U.G. Krishnamurti (1918-2007) put it like this:
“A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. The true guru tells you, “Throw them away and don't replace them. You can walk and if you fall you will rise and walk again.” Such is the man whom we consider or even tradition considers to be the real guru and not those who are selling those shoddy pieces of goods in the marketplace today. It is a business. It has become a holy business to people.
I am not condemning anything but as long as you depend upon somebody for solving your problems so long you remain helpless. And this helplessness is exploited by the people who actually do not have the answers to your problems but they give you some sort of a comforting.
What a tremendous amount of energy we waste trying to become that! If that energy is released what is it that we can't do? How simple it would be for every one of us to live in this world! It is so simple.”—The Natural State
If there is any Yoga practice in your life, it is participation only in the mystery condition that is already the case, not a seeking or an attempt to solve an imagined problem.
We are returning to the pre-doctrinal, pre-authority Shamanic roots of Yoga which arose in cultures that had no interest in secular or religious power structure or knowledge as power structure because it had not been invented yet. Cultures which had no interest in male dominance and no knowledge of it. These people simply understood that God, deity, guru, spouse, and all seen and unseen conditions of Life were arising in the One Reality. The Guru function was there in the community to help people become stable in the recognition that they were at One with the Cosmos. Yoga was given compassionately as the means.
The student is now embracing the power of this cosmos that is arising as each person, as pure intelligence in the unspeakable beauty and intrinsic harmony of Reality.
Obviously this can be a difficult job. Yet the teaching function has always been there in non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal culture. And it must be there for all people. All wisdom traditions of humanity are based on the mutual affection between two actual and equal people.
About the Author:-
Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant.
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