Hierarchy

Q: "You encourage people to study meditation with a teacher, but the hierarchial model would seem to be opposed to the development of the heart that you espouse. I'm not comfortable with hierarchies and I certainly wouldn't want to refer to a hierarchy about something as important to me as the development of my own heart. Why do you have a hierarchical bias?"
 
A: A school is hierarchical, even a meditation school. But that hierarchy is based on experience and demonstrated by results. It is not a hierarchy like the Army, nor like the nuclear family. It would be more correct to call it a "meritocracy," because a person's position depends on their ability. A teacher can fall, too, so no one can rest on their past accomplishments.

In the meritocracy of a modern school, the people at the "top" don't get more privileges, they get more responsibility. The people at the "bottom" receive, the people at the "top" give. Anyone who wants to give goes to the top. Most people want to receive, so they go to the bottom. As people catch the purpose of the school and want to contribute to it, they "rise." Of course, a person is nothing but a pipe, both giving and receiving, but one process hides the other.

The old hierarchies engaged in secrecy, but there are no secrets anymore. The personal lives of the teachers are more exposed than the personal lives of the students. Hiding things implies a lack of trust. A meritocracy is open; it publishes its grand plan for criticism and modification by those who will carry it out.

A modern school respects and honors its students as adults. The teacher must never belittle or putdown a student. The essence of what the teacher does is to open the student, which happens through love and loving recognition of the student's state. The teacher plays cupid to help the student love their heart and soul, eventually surrendering all else to the Self, not to the teacher.

A real teacher learns more than the students. Active learning is the best way to learn, so those who take on some responsibility have a shorter path. The challenge for each person is to find their accommodation in the school according to their skills, desire, and "realization," which means how much of the teaching has sunk into your bones where it is instantly accessible for application.

A hierarchy assumes rising levels of infallibility. But I know that the most inspired idea can come through anyone, and that anyone can suffer errors in judgment, especially in not thinking beyond their personal history.

Part of Living from the Heart is being able to use the heart to make decisions. For example, to the extent that I am able to access my heart, I trust the decisions it inspires. But the challenges of others can be very helpful. I don't get the right answers from my heart if I don't ask the right questions.

What keeps a school from slipping from meritocracy back into hierarchy is the principle of working from the heart. The heart looks for agreement and similarity. The heart loves to bow, and to lift up others. It wants to answer the call of other hearts and to bring out the best in others. It wants to expand and take in all the experience of the world. It is not afraid and so doesn't have to hide behind structure. It is drawn to all emotion, all passion, but it feels most the underlying, universal emotion that integrates all individual desires.

I hope you don't let your prior experience of the limitations of hierarchies keep you from discovering the advantages you would gain from working with a school of meritocracy.

By Puran Bair, author of "Living from the Heart" (Random House, 1998)
© 1999 by The Institute for Applied Meditation, Inc.
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