Mark Whitwell on the Teacher-Student Relationship

An Interview with Rosalind Atkinson 

Rosalind Atkinson: Mark, as a well-known student of Indian traditions, Yoga in particular, you’ve been quite outspoken about the genuine teacher-student relationship as a traditional form of transmission that is still relevant. With so many examples of Guru disasters in the West, do you feel a need to readdress that position?

Mark Whitwell: Well, we have to be careful what we mean when we say traditional: Indian traditions have given us all kinds of diverse guru figures, from charlatans to acharyas to jivamuktis to avatars and all have their place, barring maybe the charlatans. When I was in India in the 1970s travelling around as a naive young man I encountered a full range of “teachers.” Just like in any other place we have to learn to navigate our way through. And cut through any exoticist tendency to fall at the feet of anyone in an orange robe without any discernment. Certainly, I think it would be fair to say that guru and swami cultures of celibacy, as in the Catholic Church, have created sexual perversion when the sexual impulse comes out later in unhealthy ways. So the suspicion toward that is justified. But celibate culture is by no means the only model for a teacher given in the Indian traditions. My own teachers, Desikachar and his father Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, were both married with families, Krishnamacharya’s guru in the Himalaya lived there with his partner and children (this sometimes surprises people who have the stereotyped expectation that cave-dwelling yogis must be renunciate monks). And they looked back through their Vedantic lineage to Ramanuja of the 10th century, who is also an advocate for the householder (implying sexually active) Yogi life as a valid devotional life path.

Rosalind Atkinson: So Krishnamacharya wasn’t an advocate of brahmacharya?

Mark Whitwell: Krishnamacharya very deliberately defined brahmacharya as “right relatedness“ or protection of one’s viryam or vitality rather than as celibacy. He said that was an incorrect translation popularised by religious men. You look back in his Vedantic or Yoga lineage and there wasn’t the stereotyped elevation of celibacy or monk life. That’s a modern western projection onto the image of the yogi as a result of conflicted experiences and feelings about sex, projection of the image of the Christian monk or nun. Combined with the success of the early Hindu swamis such as Vivekananda who spread yoga as part of their basic religious missionary activity. I’m not saying that celibacy might not arise completely effortlessly and naturally for some people, but it must not be imposed or glamourised or practiced as a wilful ambitious system to try and get closer to God. It’s a denial of the very means by which you got here, the Creator, your parents coming together! It’s misogynistic denial of the wonder of birth and motherhood and sex, and it creates total chaos down the road, as we have seen. 

Rosalind Atkinson: So what were your feelings when you viewed the Wild Wild Country Rajneesh [Osho] documentary?

Mark Whitwell: I felt great admiration for all of the young people making a brave experiment to try something different from the usual bland American life. I felt sympathy for them and their naive experiments and hopeful utopia, their longing to give themselves to something pure and true. I felt that the documentary only accidentally or subtly showed the truth of the situation, which was two cultic entities battling one another: the harsh, violent, repressive, Christian cult of the normal, complete with their guru and their yantra of the crucifix in the background; and the naive, psychologically unresolved group-think of the devotees. With a few dangerous power-hungry manipulators running the show. 

A friend described Rajneesh as a beautiful mystic poet without the actual Guru function, and I feel this is probably accurate. It broke my heart seeing him in chains in custody, the smugness of the mainstream establishment, how deeply they were threatened. As if they were not waging their own wars all over the world in their own insane psychology of dominance. While they panicked about Rajneeshpuram, the US Navy was shooting down a civilian plane over Iran, killing 290 people, 66 children. Bombing Libya, invading Panama, the Gulf war, etc etc. Anyone who tells you the two can’t be compared hasn’t really looked into the psychotic violence of the US government. And that’s just the explicit violence.

I would love to have been there and taught yoga to all of the sannyasins so they could feel the power of their own life through the power of their own breath and step out of the social dynamic of disempowerment and into actual participation in their Guru, in their beloved. Yoga is the practical means to actualise their beautiful radical ideas. When I fell in love with Muktananda in the 1970s, it was the yoga from Krishnamacharya and Desikachar that enabled that relationship to be something true and useful, to make use of that shakti and not become a lost addict.

I have met many devotees who were with Osho, either in Oregon or earlier, and I honour their courage to try something different. Although in many ways it was not that different after all. Mainstream culture has an obsession with cults as a way to avoid looking at its own cultic formation, and so these people have been shamed as if they made an idiotic life choice, as if they were suckers. When really, they were by and large continuing the usual life’s hierarchies and projections in a new setting, and at least had the courage to criticise many aspects of mainstream society and try to commit to something different. Shaming the young people who were brave enough to try something different for cultism is just the mainstream culture projecting out its own cultism. The cult of the normal. The biggest cult of all.  

Rosalind Atkinson: One evolution we’ve seen is people calling themselves guides or something like that rather than ‘teacher’ to try and step around all of the suspicion of authority and pollution around the word guru. What do you make of this?

Mark Whitwell: Well, it’s fair enough and good on them to want to avoid reproducing hierarchies in teaching settings and many of these people are conscientiously trying to develop new models of relationships that are safe and respectful of the student. And certainly, you want to avoid anyone who is declaring “I am Guru.” However, the risk here is that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. We want to hold the baby and drain the water. Hold onto the treasure that is the intervention of a teacher who really likes and cares for you as no more than a friend no less than a friend, the function of nurturing in local community, not a boss, not an authority. A sense of being traumatised by authorities and false prophets is not cause enough to reject the entire ancient Indian tradition of transmission through relationship, the means of all realisation. Even in the rare cases where this relationship was with a non-embodied entity or a natural phenomenon such as a mountain, it was still a relationship. For most of us, though, we need an actual human intervention. Someone who cares about us and is not trying to manipulate us. We need someone who is willing to be there for us in life, which is no small matter. It requires sincerity and a commitment to be in a relationship by both, the teacher and the student. That is the heart of yoga.

And on the other hand, many of the people who are calling themselves ‘guides’ are still in fact creating authoritative hierarchies based on information economies. They are trying to offset their own longing for power, but until they recognise each person as the power of the cosmos, they won’t succeed. Until they get rid of this pernicious idea of a linear path which they are further down. As J. Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land.” You can’t get to the truth. No-one can sell you the truth, or a method to it. You are the truth. You can’t be truth. Here is the truth [waves hand through air]. So it doesn’t matter what exactly you call yourself, what matters is for the teacher to get down off the pedestal and be normal. Be a friend. Find that in themselves that is always inherently equal with everyone else and relate to everyone else on that already-whole basis. Not seeing your ‘students’ as people you have to improve and make more like yourself. Or as lesser people who need educating or who need to renounce their egos. It’s insulting. There must be yoga, the practical means for each person to feel that they are in fact the power of the cosmos, and so are you. Already, always, inherently. Reality is reality no matter what the mind is up to. This enables participation and recognition of real equality beyond all the mind-made hierarchies. Hierarchy in the form of leadership may be appropriate in some workplaces, or a ship in a storm maybe, but not in spirituality. Not in yoga. 

Rosalind Atkinson: Do you think westerners have rejected the Guru function just through sadness at not having found any sincere teachers? And perhaps disillusionment from when they did look up to somebody, get all excited, project some unresolved parental stuff on them, only to be disappointed by finally noticing that person’s manipulations or egoic flaws?

Mark Whitwell: Absolutely. Every person carries that hurt and the resulting suspicion in them from their first relationships onward. That’s why if we do discover a teacher who is not doing the usual thing, which is just business, we are very lucky. And if we can learn to trust them despite being hurt in the past, we are even more fortunate. Desikachar used to always say that you should hold the teacher at arm’s length until you were sure they weren’t unscrupulous. When I met Desikachar and Krishnamacharya, I was struck by their humility. Sitting on the floor of the home-sharing a meal, there was no posturing or social hierarchy. If you look at Krishnamacharya’s business card, you would never guess from it that he had the equivalent of seven PhDs. It simply says “Yoga acharya.” And yet despite their great service to humanity, their great strides ahead in bringing yoga through, neither were ‘perfect people.’ They both had their patterns of Brahman male sternness and reluctance to speak on certain topics such as sexuality, a topic which I believe we must speak on as it is now a realm of such confusion and suffering. 

So there is toxicity both in teachers posturing as perfect people that others must duplicate or become more like, but also in the demand from the public that teachers be ‘perfect’ according to their arbitrary opinions of right and wrong. There are expectations of the natural results of practice that we can look for in a teacher, sure, but we have to be very careful to disentangle projections of cultural demands (the same arbitrary things we are punishing ourselves with) from justified expectations. For example, if you had asked the great saint Ramana Maharshi’s mother what he was like, in the early days before she came around and became his student, she would probably have told you that he was a terrible son who had abandoned his mother. And by worldly cultural expectations, he was. Does that sound like someone you want as your Guru? So we have to be careful of what standards we are applying and if they are valid. 

UG Krishnamurti would frequently outrage and upset people with his refusal to play the role of the special person on the special chair. I remember sometimes when someone would try and touch his feet, he would try to touch their feet, and there’d be this ridiculous bent-over shuffling dance. He was so scrupulous not allowing people to put him on a pedestal. But not breaking social conventions just for the hell of it or shock tactics or whatever. Ram Dass said to me of his meeting with UG, “he shot down all my ideas like clay pigeons, but I had the feeling that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”  

Rosalind Atkinson: UG was recognised as a jivamukti, a liberated being... what for you were the signs of that?

Mark Whitwell: Well, I wasn’t looking for signs, I wasn’t looking for someone to do something for me. He would have sent me packing. I had been lucky to have been given yoga by my teachers and to not have that desperate hunt. UG was so fierce with people, yet it was deep compassion to frustrate that logic of seeking in them, that denial of what they already were. He would not allow anyone to continue in a logic of trying to duplicate his experience. But we loved UG because he was so beautiful. A natural man, like a cat. I only ever felt pure love from him, always. Desikachar loved going to see UG. It was beyond any philosophy or dharma, he was just a very attractive man.

If you’re trying to work out “are they or aren’t they” about your teacher, that’s a guarantee you’re trying to get somewhere via them, trying to use them to change your state or whatever. No change of state is needed to realise the truth. It’s a love relationship, not trying to squeeze something out of them like a tube of toothpaste. They don’t have something that you need to get. You already have it. You hang around because you really like each other. It’s not a transaction. Being a teacher in such a way is a dangerous job because people can be very hungry in their search, and very angry when they don’t get what they want. A teacher has to field all kinds of projections, which is what happens in actual relationships. Love brings up everything that is unloved, to be seen and understood.

Rosalind Atkinson: So to conclude, based on your experiences with your teachers, you believe that a traditional guru-sishya relationship can function for westerners?

Mark Whitwell: Yes. It has probably always been a narrow thread, surrounded by perversions of that sacred friendship. Abuse did not start when the west got involved. UG was always so scathing about how India glamourises her own history of charlatans and power-mongers, the business of spirituality… He would say that all gurus should be shot on sight. Meanwhile, he was quietly in that function with many people who mysteriously felt more free in their lives as a result of his blasting of their romantic ideals and searching.

What is new is westerners insisting that the entire indigenous guru-sishya tradition is invalid or irresponsible, an arrogant and imperialistic claim, a continuation of the colonisation project. We see this manifest in things like yoga studios refusing to publish the names of the teachers on class schedules, to avoid ‘favouritism’. That relationship is the heart of yoga being deliberately prevented in the name of safety. That is the work of hurt people, hurt people who feel confident that they can improve upon thousands of years old tradition.

But all the therapeutic professionalism and teaching standards in the world cannot replace the power of mutual respect and affection between two actual people who really love and care about each other. This may be demonised by the individualistic mind, afraid of intimacy, afraid of being dominated, afraid of unresolved past traumas, afraid that that friendship will mean a loss of independence somehow… but it will still remain the universal means of transformation. It is a human thing, not just an Indian cultural thing. It’s just that India did have these cultures of recognising that, and so we honour India, we honour our teachers. 

Rosalind Atkinson: Thank you, Mark.

Mark Whitwell: Thank you.