who has gone on ahead and returns to help in intimately mysterious ways. For the most part though, a physical teacher will find us when we are ready, when we have come as far as we can on our own and still hunger to know, still find deep dissatisfaction with the world and what it offers, with ourself. Relations between master and disciple are individual, private, demanding, based on love and service which flow both ways, based on the recognition that the student wants what the master has and the master knows how to dispense it.

There is nothing egalitarian in this association, nothing which permits the disciple to pick and choose what he or she accepts or rejects, we are dealing with absolutes here. When we go to a great violinist for lessons and we are told that we must place our finger exactly here to get the note in tune, we cannot deviate by the thousandth part of an inch, if we are told to play certain notes upbow we cannot play them downbow, if we are told the only way to finger a passage is this way, we cannot play it that way. We do not dispute, we do not debate since we have the overriding conviction this person knows what we do not. The student accepts the virtuoso's word implicitly because he knows from the experience of listening to the teacher play,

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