I was writing an article about certain practices to cope with and resolve stresses in life. I asked a respected teacher for feedback and was told that some of the teachings some of the practice I presented was too advanced for my likely audience. Rather than helping to achieve greater peace and stability it would likely cause or potentially cause more internal conflict and stress.
I was a bit surprised by this response as I had felt that enabling people with these practices would enable them to make greater progress towards stability and peace. But it raised a very interesting point of reflection for me.
Swimming lessons at the Lifeguard level advise you to use tools to help assist drowning individuals, and otherwise to approach with with caution.ย They teach you a set of defensive swimming techniques in the case that you do not have the equipment available yet still need to attempt to approach a actively drowning person to save their life. The reason they do this is because it is very easy for the frantic drowning individual to see the person coming to save them as a potential life-raft, and to approach them with a very aggressive fashion. Through attempting to cling to the would-be saver, the drowning individual can overwhelm and cause the saver to lose the ability to swim, turning a potential saver into another victim as well.
There are some parallels between these two things.ย When given a set of practices one is not equipped to successfully complete, it can lead to feelings of discouragement and eat away at or undermine the basic confidence we seek to acquire in order to operate effectively. It is easy for something that is too difficult to become very discouraging and may cause us to give up seeking an appropriate space on the path in terms of our own development.ย I believe that is why or partly why the person-to-person interaction in most spiritual traditions is so highly emphasized although there is something to be said for advancing technology which is now enabling forms of communication that were not typical before.
Now is much easier to reach a million people then it would have been while these traditions and practices were originally being developed. But with that distance comes a lack of nuance and it’s very important for the teachings, even though they may be universal, to have an appropriate individual application else the message may be lost. This also seems likely to be the reason why more advanced teachings were guarded so that individual practitioners could be more straightforwardly lead through the path, without the risk of jumping into space that is too deep for them. That is also why you tend to see the most promulgation of base-level teachings, which becomes quite an interesting dynamic with the internet and self teaching movements.
I believe this lends itself to the notion of the path. It’s not just a bullseye where we are working to get deeper into a form of concentric circles. But rather set stages of development where we are continually equipping ourselves to deal with the requirements of the stages of deeper practice.
That makes sense to me with reflection. So then the question becomes how to equip with the necessary steps to achieve the depth of practice required for what I’m seeking to communicate. It all comes back to a question of building and developing personal capacity. How to develop capacity.