The esoteric secrets of the deepest spiritual teachings are available to us today on a keyboard click. It wasn't always this way of course. The profoundest of spiritual teachings were reserved, kept in abeyance by the teacher and only presented when the devotee was able to receive them. This delicate play or dance of preparation, readiness, and masterful timing and sensitivity was a central part of the teacher-pupil relationship. In whatever cultural clothing it appears in the historical narratives, we can witness variously how Jesus of Nazareth reserved higher teachings for his disciples, in for example the Beatitudes. Buddha created a network of grading disciples according to ability. Ramakrishna took care that he was not overheard uttering the deepest sacred truths to his most intimate disciples, and inner circles of more "advanced" devotees seem to exist in most teachers' environments.

Today the teachings are more popular than the teacher in the true sense. Spiritual seekers "sleep around spiritually," attach to several teachers at the same time, and browse a little here and graze a little there to create an individualized spiritual diet of preferred tastes and individualized "feel." The spiritual teacher however knows the problems this process inevitably leads to. He reserves the profoundest teachings for the right time, observing the pupil with insightful precision. Confusion does not aid spiritual effort, neither does bewilderment bring clarity. Part of spiritual development is the atrophying of questions. Whereas the easy availability of esoteric truths contradict, convolute, and obfuscate the teachings and are a goad to creating questions, questions on questions, question about questions and so on.

Enjoy the license we have today for indulging in the plethora of ancient and modern teachings, but please understand that the teacher gives you the teachings; you do not take them. Their truth is inherent in the teacher's transmission, not in the matter of the words or mode of expression in itself. The teachings are nothing without the teacher. You will understand but little and what you do understand will make you arrogant, afraid, or confused... or all these. But through the agency of the spiritual teacher, the same teachings will bring you to liberation, inspire you to realization, and deliver you to freedom.