The Teacher Who Screamed With Love
El Maestro Que Gritaba Con Amor
A reflection on how a student came to understand his teacher's radical methods over time, realizing that what once seemed like poetry or madness was in fact precise, literal description.
The Teacher Who Screamed With Love
A reflection on how a student came to understand his teacher's radical methods over time, realizing that what once seemed like poetry or madness was in fact precise, literal description.
It's amazing, because he would say many things in the groups, and when he was speaking, there were often remarks like, "What I'm saying now is mostly for afterwards, when you hear it in a few years. Maybe then you'll get it." And it really was like that. You start getting him much more only years later.
Understanding that arrives late
Last year it was extraordinary. I kept thinking, "Why didn't he talk about all of this?" And then, in the group we're part of, people are constantly editing sections of old recordings, so we listen to him. I found myself stunned: he was talking about it all the time. I just never realized what he was actually saying.
There were things in the past that I thought he was just speaking poetically, because he would sometimes launch into what felt like spontaneous recitations of poetry. The ways in which he spoke from many different places were very wild. So I always assumed some of what he was saying was figurative, not very literal. The opposite of literal. And now I'm realizing how much of what I dismissed as poetry was him being as literal, descriptive, accurate, and factual as possible. But in my mind, I was denying it by telling myself, "Well, that's just poetry. That's poetic."
And then he would scream at me. It would be something as ordinary as having lunch, and he would scream at me while sitting right next to me: "You don't listen to me. All of your energy goes to ignoring me, to resisting me."
Screaming as wake-up energy
Was that helpful? It was hilarious, actually. It would basically reflect something I wasn't aware of. He screamed a lot, and his screaming was, much of the time, a kind of wake-up energy. But it was also hilarious. Depending on the moment, it was quite hilarious.
There was no length he would not go to in order to reach his students. Sometimes it was extreme, screaming at you, telling you that you were absolutely crazy. If anybody else shouted at you like that, you would totally go on the defensive, or you'd run. But you could sense a loving energy behind it. He was very special.
I remember once I said something, and he screamed, "If I could only give you a lobotomy, I would find the part of the brain that created that idiotic thought and remove it." And then I would just start laughing. It was his way of saying: drop that thought completely. Drop the belief. It's hard to replicate him, but comedy was a genuine gift in him.
The insignificant insects
I'll share one more anecdote, because I just love talking about him. A certain visiting teacher would come twice a year to Argentina and stay with him, and they would do workshops together. We were doing a weekend workshop with this visiting teacher, and our teacher was always there, just in presence, quiet, letting the space be for the other's work. But you can't not have him in the room. The visiting teacher would run his sessions, and about half the people were our teacher's students, while another twenty or thirty had come just to see the visiting teacher. Most of them had no idea who our teacher was.
During one of the breaks, the visiting teacher went outside into the sun and sat on a bench. I came to sit with him. Our teacher was inside with about twenty or thirty people, and we could see into the meditation space from where we sat. At one point, our teacher was standing on a chair, screaming: "You insignificant insects! You are all so small! I will stomp you!" Just going on this wild rant, and there was roaring laughter from the group, total madness, everyone losing control, laughing uncontrollably. Meanwhile, the visiting teacher, whose workshop this was, was sitting outside watching all of this. He turned to me and said, "He is my alter ego. I cannot handle this guy."
It was just so funny. He could hear the screaming and then the roars of laughter, and he kept asking me, "What is he saying?" because he didn't understand Spanish. So I would translate, and he would just shake his head in disbelief. They had very, very different styles, to put it mildly.