A Master, or Teacher, or Guru, or Sage… the name by which they are called is less important than the service they provide to you when you encounter them in the course of pursuing your arête. A Master may be in your life along its entire path, or for just a moment; the duration doesn’t matter — what matters is that they give you what you need to learn what you need to learn to make progress on your path.

What most people misunderstand is that the Master isn’t there to provide you with answers — they are there to share the things they have learned in answering their own questions, so that you can find your own. No one can simply give you answers, because no one else really knows the questions that are most important to your progress. Questions like that don’t simply come out of nowhere — they come from within in response to the teachings of a Master. And similarly, so must the answers.

Read the Meditation I’ve shared with you below. It is a challenge. If your response to it is “Yes,” then you already know what it is trying to teach you and you move forward in pursuit of your arête in the ways that are best suited to the path you have chosen.

But, if your response to any part of it is “I can’t,” then you must ask yourself all the reasons why — because those are the most important questions to answer, and both the questions and the answers, as well as the decision about what your next step should be, are not things a Master can tell you. Only you know. Only you can ask. Only you can answer. And, at last, only you can choose how to respond.