James Wood Teachings

In the introduction to my book, The Path of Awakening, I write the following:

Most people think that a spiritual teacher is a person outside you. This is not necessarily the case. The ultimate Teacher is Truth, or who you are in your essence, so you already have a Teacher inside you. Everyone does. You are your own Teacher.

I speak and write a lot about the importance of the Teacher. This can easily be misunderstood to mean that the Teacher is an external authority, which is not true.

Because the Teacher is who you essentially are already, what you are doing on the spiritual path is tapping into your true nature and allowing it to become conscious of Itself through your person. The external Teacher is that aspect of it that appears externally. And because your essence is one without a second, it cannot be an authority over you, just as a hand cannot grasp itself.

The authority of the Teacher is to invite you to become conscious of who you actually are, or what consciousness really is. All you have to do is listen.