A Spiritual Friend
2025, May, Issue 148
When this great Spiritual
Need
becomes present in our heart center,
as our capacity allows,
as the light grows, it is important
to pray for help from a Spiritual Friend
who can genuinely help;
Pay attention to the Guru within,
this true Buddha,
this intuitive knowing
that is your own Buddha Nature
connecting with one who can help,
with a Spiritual Friend,
maybe a Guru you might not yet remember,
one who has been just there in your heart center
just waiting for you to call, one who is
there, just there, ready,
ready to help in any way possible,
in your time of need,
just waiting to be called from afar,
by your own genuine aspiration,
your profound wish to awaken;
Your own aspiration
to awaken
genuinely creates
this gravity you will need,
this great compassion necessary
to discover for yourself
a Spiritual Friend at the most perfect time,
a friend of most profound proportions,
with all the qualities of a Buddha
apparent only to you.
A poem by Robert Aho © 2025
People seem to a little bit confused about this notion of finding a teacher who will help them with their Spiritual Practice. I see people looking for the most famous teachers, or those who have the most followers, or those who seem like they’ve become wealthy from teaching. None of these are actually very good attributes.
What we really need is to find someone who is genuine, not someone with a huge marketing campaign or the backing of some institution or swarms of glassy-eyed students. We don’t need someone who is more concerned about their corporate brand or the number of students they can accumulate. We need a genuine Spiritual Friend.
You might hear that it is important to find a qualified teacher, which is a term that has devolved into meaning that an institution has granted them a certificate for teaching. What being qualified really should mean is that the teacher has attained some level of realization that we haven’t yet achieved in our Spiritual Practice; and, so, we seek help from them, knowing that they can help us. They are qualified in this way, by being genuine, by realizing what we need to know. Maybe they have realized Emptiness, or even the Nature of Mind. Whether they can present a certificate or not is highly irrelevant. Some of the greatest teachers throughout time had absolutely no institutional backing whatsoever, no certificate they could produce.
Milarepa, for instance, was no more than a pathetic vagabond; and, yet, he became one of the greatest Spiritual Practitioners of all time. Even today the great Spiritual Practitioners among us are unknown hidden yogis. People wonder where all the great masters have gone. They’re here, we just can’t see them because we have allowed ourselves to become bedazzled by all the wrong things.
We need a genuine teacher who is actually able to help us. We need someone who doesn’t seek money or fame in any way, someone without worldly attachments. We need the real deal, or there’s not much hope of finding any sort of help. We need a Spiritual Friend.
What this really means is that we find someone who is more experienced than we are, someone who is genuinely on the Spiritual Path and can help when we ask for help. It’s been said that we should take a decade or longer to decide who we want as our Guru. Now, this, of course, is not what people do. The egotistical practitioner looks for someone who they can brag about.
Things that we should avoid are teachers who create cultish surroundings, asking people not to question anything that they say. We need to stay away from teachers who obviously need to feed their own egos or have improper motivations, maybe haven’t yet learned to be ethical or kind. It’s not too hard to find accolades surrounding these types of teachers who run after fame and fortune. These are teachers who are influenced by improper motivations.
A Real Guru is not interested in that sort of thing. They genuinely have a wish to help people awaken any way that they can. This sort of person might look like a vagabond or crazy person.
When we are wrapped up in our own worldly concerns, we become conditioned to look at the wrong things, strong PR campaigns, pomp and ceremony, attributes in others that really won’t help us in any way. If someone seems rather polished, maybe a perfect example of a slick marketing campaign, it is very likely that they don’t have much to offer. When we strive to awaken, we don’t have time to worry about looking slick. A genuine Spiritual Friend whispers sacred and profound teachings to those who have made themselves available to such wisdom.
If you wish to awaken, you will need one or more Spiritual Friends who can genuinely help you. Such friends have time for you when you need help. Without such friends, we can easily become dismayed or simply veer off the Spiritual Path into one of the many traps along the way. We need a little help, a little coaxing from time to time. This is the Path, this is important if we wish to awaken.
Blessings in Light,
Robert Aho