Nowadays everyone wants to be a master without first having been a disciple. One becomes a writer before having been a translator. But then, man is like that: he would sooner be lord in hell than servant in heaven. A masterclass usually means, say, an outstanding violinist giving advanced lessons to younger violinists: the master leads the class. But what is it like when the masters are the ones taking the class?

In a spiritual sense, this is what truly makes sense. Without a disciple's readiness to serve, no one becomes a master – at most a craftsman. It is well known that without training there is no skill. Higher abilities without self-control can be fatal, so a master must be able not only to set spiritual processes in motion but, when need be, to halt them as well. In everyday life you complete a course, and it ends with an exam. The master-class never ends, and you are always sitting the exam. Just as life is forever questioning us, so the masterclass too is made of questions. There is no marking, no examining board, but sincerity and rigour are required. Try to answer in that spirit.

First Level

  • 1. What are the most important insights from your spiritual strivings so far?
  • 2. What would you do if you were left alone with your faith, say on a desert island?
  • 3. Where should you delve deeper?
  • 4. What do you see as your own virtues and weaknesses?
  • 5. What are the most important guiding principles of your life?
  • 6. Have your dogmas been overturned yet?
  • 7. What are your most important goals?
  • 8. How do you measure the usefulness and meaning of your own work, your service?
  • 9. What do you consider the most delicate, sensitive, dangerous points in life?
  • 10. Are you able to observe yourself from the outside, and to influence the course of things?

Second Level

  • 1. Is it permissible to enter the service of an idea? Is the goal its survival, its transmission, its viability?
  • 2. Do classic people and situations in life still exist? Is anyone still capable of friendship, of complete self-giving?
  • 3. Does one always find one's helpers? Can faults and failings hide the original sincere intention?
  • 4. What is the readiness to sacrifice? Can a whole life be sacrificed? Is there not an abuse in accepting a life-sacrifice?
  • 5. Can one intervene in one's own fate, or in another's life? Can individual fate, the path of a life, be rewritten? Does redemption exist?
  • 6. What are the embers slumbering beneath the ash, and what is the outburst, the permanent ecstasy?
  • 7. Which prevails, the individual's instinct for life, or what the master sees in his disciple?
  • 8. What holds back the expression of love? Why the potential difference between lover and beloved? How selfless, or how possessive, is love?
  • 9. Is that which is human beautiful, or merely mud, biology, illusion-magic?
  • 10. Is there any ground for reproach if, in a human relationship, both sides try sincerely but something does not turn out perfectly? And may one reproach God?