Every tradition uses the gardener as an analogy for spiritual work. The garden is a place where everything grows within a prescribed area. We are gardens where everything grows, both beautiful and ugly things. And many times in a garden a beautiful plant begins to be seen as a weed because it has been allowed to grow to the detriment of the whole.
The garden must be tended carefully. If we do not do this then, as Kipling used to say, the jungle is allowed in. When tending a garden, restraint and discipline are vital to the garden’s life and longevity. If we do not exercise restraint and discipline, then the integrity and structure of the garden will be compromised. If our care is too tight, then we strangle the life from the garden; if we are too lax, we lose the garden completely.
The good gardener is like a loving mother: direct and soft, firm and caring, nurturing and critical. A good gardener or teacher is able to see the whole picture and discern the correct path to a fulfilled life. There will be times when the plants or students do not follow the path to their own success and fulfillment. This is where the gardener moves in with a firm and clear hand, able to correct the course, able to move everything and everyone back in line.
When a gardener neglects the garden, it is left to its own devices. The plants grow anywhere and propagate in places that hurt the feel of the garden. Plants grow into each other so that there is no clarity. The garden has no discipline, and even if there are great plants, they cannot be distinguished from each other or even from weeds. Everything becomes an expression of vagueness; the message of the garden is confusion and lack of consciousness.
The teacher of spiritual practice must be a consummate gardener. The student can also be seen as the plant. Constantly aware, the teacher knows the correct tools to use with a student. The teacher, seeing the whole picture, directs the student in the right course even when the student doubts or resists. Our qualities can also be seen as plants that are either allowed to grow or clipped back. Unhealthy qualities have to be pruned and hopefully rooted out. The teacher will see the student’s qualities and be able to encourage the good ones.
The teacher provides the fertile environment for growth. The student will decide whether he or she wants to grow or not. If not, he leaves, removed from the garden because he does not contribute to the whole.
Each teacher, like every gardener, has a particular style, so that students are attracted to the environment or repulsed by it. There is a mutual vetting. A student or plant needs a certain environment in order to thrive.
This reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”. Rappaccini created a garden filled with poisonous plants. He brought his daughter up in this garden exposing her to small quantities of these plants. She was then unable to leave the environment that she appeared to thrive in. She was a prisoner in her own home. A good teacher or gardener does not imprison but frees the student or plant to be capable of thriving when transplanted outside the initial garden. The teaching or tending moves the student or plant to thrive and share the life and love of the original garden. Beatrice could have figured out how to detoxify herself, but would she? Did she have the tools, did her father give them to her? And even with the tools, would she have used them? She was not nurtured to be alive and free.
A good teacher will share all that he has to share. The teacher wants a student to reach the goal of Absolute Freedom and pure Love.
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