Recently, someone posted a comment on the website of my teacher (Fred Davis), who is known for waking people up in a very short amount of time (less than an hour). In her comment, she referred to another famous spiritual teacher who found that he could also “wake” people up quickly and easily. However, he later decided that waking up in this manner was not a natural arising from within, so he consciously decided to stop facilitating those awakenings.
As you might already know, I have been studying with Fred Davis now for a couple years after practicing Zen Buddhism for about 25 years. Now, I did not have an initial awakening with Fred; but I did subsequently wake up with Fred after seemingly having ‘lost’ it.
(Note here that language is difficult. People do not actually wake up. That is because there is no one there to wake up. What happens is that Awakeness (again, to communicate this requires that I call it something; when it fact, what wakes up is no thing [nothing] at all) wakes up to the fact that it is not a character with which it had long identified. Awakening is really a manner of shifting perceptive from the conditioned patterns that form the basis of the fictitious character to identifying with (or abiding as) the spacious, boundless, eternal nature of being (a verb, not a noun). More about this in other posts.)
The point regarding the unnamed spiritual teacher’s perspective is that there is no difference between having Awakeness awaken to itself spontaneously or being assisted by Awakeness through a teacher. There is just one thing going on anyway, so the manner in which Awakeness wakes up to itself doesn’t matter! Either way, the student (so to speak) was ready!
Relatedly, as a metaphor, if you come upon someone who is desperately lost, do you (a) leave him alone and hopes s/he finds his way, (b) give him/her a map and have them try to figure out where to do, (c) give the person specific directions to their destination and wish him/her well or (d) lead the person directly to his/her destination. I know which approach I would prefer! I choose (d)! And, like Fred Davis, this is the approach I take when working with others.