Pupils and Teachers


The reason the student is called "pupil" is that she sees a reflection of herself in the eye -- in the pupil -- of the teacher.

The teacher has had teachers, and knows that what he saw in the teacher was what was in himself but wasn't yet aware of itself.  It had to be seen first, in a mirror ... something that was both there and not there .. Don Juan observed that a sorcerer is an empty man, except for a collection of stories with a universal application.

The teacher sees the student not just as she is now, but as she will be later on, when she owns what she now sees in him.

Of course, a young person can be reflected back in a negative way, too.  This is the voice inside which says "You aren't good enough, smart enough, mean enough, tough enough, brave enough, you're too vain, too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too rude, too ..."  whatever it is, the source is the same.  The source is called "negative mother," which is the "old witch."  It is not personal, but is one of the patterns in the human psyche.

These patterns in human society, generally denied or forgotten, (as in Sleeping Beauty), derive from the drive in every mammalian female to nurture the young when there is plenty of food and destroy them when there is scarcity.   Because most women are never conscious of anything but the nurturing drive, the negative drive is seen in the defensive act of over nurturing, as when there is obsessive worrying over the child's safety.  The unconscious drive to devour is perceived in the background, like dark matter.

The fact is, though, that a woman who is aware of the negative mother is much more able to deal with her, and not let her act out and cast her spells.  The real danger is being afraid of her and pretending she isn't there, the way little kids will get under the covers and close their eyes in a burning bedroom, instead of taking action.

Fantasy is seductive, and the newspaper morgue is full of stories about Jonestown and an ever expanding collection of situations where people tried to make the outer world conform to the power of their belief. There was a historical incident in which an Indian chief convinced his followers they had special powers, and the soldiers shot them down like shooting apples in a barrel.

On the other hand there is a fairy tale about a girl who goes to the witch's house, and there is a pair of disembodied hands working in the kitchen. The witch says, "Is there something you want to ask me about?"

The girl says, "Nope," and navigates her way through the encounter.

The thing about fairy tales is that they don't offer you morality. What gets the hero through in one will be certain death in another. It all depends on the situation, and the only constant is the advice of the magical animal.

The bear is often a symbol of the positive mother, because the female bear trees the cubs when she goes to get food, and they are not to come down until she gets back.  One day she just doesn't come back.  In order to survive they have to disobey her and come down and find their own food.  Once they've done that, they are independent of her, and she of them.  They might see each other at the berry patch but there's no maudlin display of sentimentality about it.

In the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, you see the pattern of not enough food, the activation of the negative mother and the terrible father, who is her servant.  The witch is sweet on the outside, and why wouldn't she be? She's blissfully unaware of her dark sister, who devours children because they are such delectable morsels. At the extremes the opposites shift places, the good mother becomes the devouring mother. Best to keep in mind that they are a matched set, and your mother passed it on to you.

The reason the emphasis is on the mother and not the father is that the basic template of life is female.  The male appears to have been created from the female to serve procreation needs. I remember reading a book by the then head of psychiatry at Yale, and he began it by apologizing that -- as much as he would like to blame the father -- it really is the mother.

Once I was at a deep tissue bodywork seminar with Dub Leigh, at Esalen Institute, and this Iranian guy couldn't handle the energy shift. He fell apart and went into a total meltdown. Some of the women were nurses and bodyworkers, and they began to gather around him. "Leave him alone," Dub said. "He's all right."

"How do you know he's alright?" one of them asked. "What's wrong with him?"

"It's his mother," Dub said.

"How do you know it's his mother?" she demanded.

He shot back, "because it's always his mother."

Posted: Wed - November 29, 2006 at 03:32 PM