INNER LIGHT MINISTRIES JOURNAL
THE SPIRITUAL TEACHER
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 3
SEPTEMBER, 2008
by Jim Gordon, President of ILM
I
(from Experiencing The Divine Retreat, Yarrow, May 2008)
remember once, when I was a small child, I developed a toothache. And I knew I’d have to get a filling. I’d just had two cavities a few months before that were filled, and I hated it. I did not want to go back to that dentist’s chair. And so I started praying to God: “God, please heal my tooth. I don’t want to go back. It hurt too much.” And while I was praying, an inner teacher came in and said to me, “Jim, you’ve got to go to the dentist. He’s got to fill that tooth. God cannot heal that tooth.” And I argued, “No, no! I know that God can heal it.” And the teacher kept saying, “No, you’ve got to go to the dentist!” And so I asked, “Why do I have to go to a dentist when God could do it?” And the teacher said, “It’s a cavity in a physical tooth. God is not going to fill that physical tooth. It’s going to take someone in the physical to do the physical work.” Right then, when he made that statement, I learned a lesson. If you’re in the physical, you look for a physical form to get things done.
And this holds true on the spiritual path, The Path of Sound and Light, as well. The Holy Spirit, that is, the “Sound and Light,” comes down from the realms of spirit into the physical world and aligns itself with someone in the physical form. That someone is a spiritual teacher. In this way the ‘teaching element’ of the Holy Spirit is imparted into the world, so that those disciples who are ready to journey on the inner pathway back home to God can find the teacher and get direct instruction. And as those disciples get to know their teacher, they come to trust and understand what they are being presented, and they begin to do the practice that they are instructed by the teacher to do, in order to see if it’s really valid for them or not. Even if a person is able to have inner experiences on their own, even if a person is connecting into unseen levels, how does he or she know if they’re going in the
right direction inside? And even if this person is getting visited by inner teachers, the person doesn’t know if the teachers are valid or not, if they’re authentic or not … how high are these inner teachers really? The person can get misinformation and be misguided. So having a teacher in a physical form, that the disciple can look to daily, that the disciple can listen to and ask questions of and get directions from, is a very important element in a person’s awakening. And that is why the Holy Spirit becomes the “Living Word,” becomes the “Word made flesh,” at all times on this planet, so that there is someone on this level who can assist those traveling the spiritual path, that disciples can relate to, and trust, and follow. The spiritual teacher does an action with a disciple called “Initiation,” laying on the hands and anchoring the Name of God into the disciple’s physical consciousness. Then the teacher assists the disciple by answering his or her questions, thus answering and quieting the mind and easing the emotions; in this and other ways assisting the disciple to adjust to the meditation practice. And thus the disciple, as a physical being, can begin to trust and honor this pathway and progress upwards on it. The spiritual teacher also helps to develop the disciple’s devotion to God, which is an important motivating and ‘magnetic’ force in the meditation practice. Sometimes it is hard or challenging to love, to be devoted to, ‘some spiritual form out there’ called God. We have no idea where God is. We don’t know what God looks like. Is God really there? We hope so. But if we have someone in the physical form whom we begin to trust and honor, and this person assists us in having inner experiences, then we begin to develop love for that physical form. Now it isn’t truly ‘about’ the spiritual teacher. It’s the Spirit that is present in that physical form that the disciple begins to fall in love with. And that love begins to grow inside of the disciple, and eventually that love leads to the direct relationship between the disciple and God. And then it’s no longer between ‘you and the teacher and God’. It is directly between ‘you and (TEACHER continues on page 3)