Spiritual Transmission. Amir Freimann

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      AMIR: What was the intensity? Do you think he deliberately put pressure on you, or was it more of a spontaneous result of being in his presence?

      HAKIM: There is a poem by Rumi about a conversation between a chickpea and the cook cooking it, which is a metaphor for the teacher-student relationship. Well, Bulent was preparing me for the role and for the responsibilities I had agreed to take. It was a highly pressurized situation. I was cooked, mashed and reshaped by him into nice hummus!

      It’s important to clarify at this point that none of this would have been possible without my permission. And my permission was an essential one, from my essence. You could say it was my essential request, which is that I wanted to get closer to the real, I wanted to be of service, I wanted to be completely under divine love. Well, if that’s the case, then certain things have to happen and some of them are going to be a little painful. This is not a caravan of pain, but pain is part of the growing. That’s what the cook says to the chickpea: “If you want to be nice, soft and delicious, if you want to realize your essential goodness, then stay in the pot.” Of course, if that essential request had not been present it might have looked like a sort of bullying. But it was not.

      AMIR: Were there times in which you felt that the pressure was too much for you?

      HAKIM: There were times when I felt completely crushed, but it’s interesting that, although being with him was sometimes like sitting in the middle of a volcano, for some reason you never felt that he was out to destroy you. Something always felt right, even though your limbs and appendages were getting chopped off. We also had a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor and we laughed a lot. Sometimes we’d be helplessly rolling over with laughter, crying with laughter, unable to breathe…

      AMIR: What was it like for you when he died?

      HAKIM: It was a very mixed period. There was the real sorrow that something has come to an end, but there was also this feeling of extraordinary joy, which was bodily joy, it didn’t come from a thought. A real grounded experience of joy which I’d never experienced before.

      AMIR: How do you understand that?

      HAKIM: When Rumi departed, he said to his followers, “Don’t grieve for me, this is only my nutshell. I’m going to rejoin my beloved.” You see, while we’re here, however much we talk about the union with the beloved, we’re still under the conditions of relativity and a kind of a distance, a trace of separation remains. When you die, or return to the source, there is the joy of reunion. Because it’s real and it’s not just his, not just Bulent’s, the whole universe experiences it. Something has become completed in the most beautiful way. It was tremendous.

      AMIR: Do you feel that he has continued to guide you in some way, to function as your teacher, even after his passing away?

      HAKIM: Yes, but when you say “he,” we have to go back to the single source which he represented. I believe it was him, but what is him? That question needs to be asked just as I need to ask, “Who am I?” If I’m asking, “Who am I?” I need to ask, “Who is he?” as well. Of course, that guidance is not limited to him. It can come from anywhere and it can still be him, but in another form. Do you see what I’m saying?

      AMIR: I do, but don’t you find there’s something in your relationship with Bulent that makes this guidance more accessible to you?

      HAKIM: That’s right, and I’ll tell you how that continues today. A maqam, a physical place or spiritual point of reference, is important for us all to find. For me, it is the Monument to Man at Chisholme, where Bulent is buried. I am fortunate that I can go there anytime, even if only in my intention. It has become a place of imagination within my intention. The fact that it’s in my imagination doesn’t mean that it’s not real. Real things happen there, in this place of the imagination, just like being with somebody in the flesh. So, yes, guidance continues. It doesn’t have to be at the monument, but the monument is for me a very useful physical representation of this guidance. When I visit, I am reminded of who I am and I am returned to who I am. All the peripheral stuff, the petty concerns, even if they don’t drop away immediately, they become reduced, and a different perspective is given. So, yes, guidance continues.

      In preparation for my meeting with Hakim, I searched online for information about Bulent, and what I found fascinated me. The description of him on the Chisholme Institute website begins like this: “Bulent Rauf (1911–87) was a man who escaped definition deliberately, but whom many varied descriptions fitted easily: a gentleman, a mystic, a world-class cook, archaeologist, writer and translator, Turkish citizen and man of the world, lover of beauty and champion of esoteric education.”

      I learned that British mystic and author Reshad Field considered Bulent to be his teacher, and that Field’s well-known book The Last Barrier—A True Story of a Journey into Ultimate Reality was about their relationship. I also stumbled upon a documentary, In Search of Oil and Sand, released in 2012, which tells a fable-like story about how Bulent, who was married to Princess Faiza, the sister of King Farouk of Egypt, created in 1952 with members of the Egyptian royal family and their friends an amateur movie, Oil and Sand, whose plot predicted with uncanny precision the coup d’état in which King Farouk was ousted—which happened only a few months later. I came to the meeting with Hakim eager to hear about his relationship with that remarkable man, and I wasn’t disappointed.

      I chose to start the book with this interview not only because it was the first one I conducted, but also because it touches on one of the most basic questions that has always baffled me: Why would a teacher tell their students that he or she is not a teacher, that they don’t need and must not have a teacher or that there is absolutely nothing to teach or learn? Why would anybody make such patently self-contradictory claims?

      This paradox was especially evident for me in regard to the powerfully awake and profoundly influential J. Krishnamurti. Videos of him speaking to an audience or conversing with someone, not only with great conviction and confidence but also with powerful authority, leave little question in my mind that, if anybody should be regarded as a spiritual teacher, it is he. So why did he often use his spiritual weight and charisma to assert that there is no teacher and no pupil, and got upset when people referred to him as a teacher or even implied that?

      These questions were highlighted also in the way Hakim spoke about his relationship with Bulent. It seems clear to me that Bulent functioned as and was a teacher to him and to his peers. Even the reasons that Hakim gave, for that not being the case, actually explained why Bulent was indeed a teacher and expressed Hakim’s great appreciation for that.

      In Mariana Caplan’s The Guru Question: The Perils and Rewards of Choosing a Spiritual Teacher, she dedicated a section in her chapter entitled “Types of Spiritual Authority” to this paradox; there, she writes:

      An increasing number of teachers say they are not teachers. There are many reasons for taking this position. In many of the contemporary neo-Advaita-Vedanta nondual traditions, for example, the labels of “teacher” and “student” are often considered illusory distinctions within the nondual truth of oneness, and therefore obstacles to the nondual realization of oneness. This model suggests that the affirmation of the teacher outside of oneself often distracts the practitioner from the truth of the inner teacher or guru, and disempowers the student’s self-awakening and the cultivation of trust in her own inner authority.

      The point of discernment to be aware of in this circumstance is as follows: When two people are functioning as teacher and student in the Western world, there is an almost inevitable arising of psychological projections and power dynamics in spite of what a teacher does or does not call him or СКАЧАТЬ