How does our relationship with a spiritual teacher change as practice matures? In this passage, James Low uses the image of a jigsaw puzzle to explore how what begins as trust gradually becomes direct knowing.
James: As long as the individual is on the path and has not reached an experience of self validation, there will always be a need for some sort of analysis, checking out where she is. The thing has not been demonstrated from the inside out, there is still a need for an external confirmation. Its like doing a jigsaw puzzle when the picture has still not emerged. One has to look back to the illustration on the box now and again. At a certain time it just comes together and there is no need to refer to the picture any more. You just go on knowingly fitting pieces together.
What the teacher of a system provides then is the picture on the box. It is a frame of reference, a meaningful context without which the practitioner may feel lost or even abandon the attempt to practise.
An educated practitioner will also know that the system she is practising is perhaps only one of a family of similar systems. Sometimes it will be helpful to look at these other systems and be aware of their similarities and differences. At other times to do this is of no use. When actually practising ones own system it is important to feel it is the best, or at least to give oneself totally to it.
From James Low, Yogins of Ladakh, p. 190
James' analogy of the jigsaw puzzle illuminates something important about the student-teacher relationship. Initially, the teacher provides the picture on the box. Their words and example give us a way of orienting ourselves when our own experience is still fragmentary. Without that orientation, it can be difficult to know whether the scattered pieces belong together at all.
Also illuminating is James' explanation of self validation. This is not a matter of confidence in one's own opinions or experiences. Rather, it is the point at which what has been understood through the teacher's guidance becomes evident in one's own experience. The understanding is no longer borrowed. It has been, in James' words, “demonstrated from the inside out.”