Does this tend to happen in other disciplines? I'm not sure I'm good enough at anything else to evaluate that.
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I've found this with meditation, dreaming and magick. On several occasions I've put myself through prescribed paths only to find the teachings had already come to me intuitively.
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Well magick and dreaming are obvious on account of being mostly about awareness, intent and symbolism!
But a lot of things are a lot less fluid than that and seem to yield similar results.
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True, but there are many who would tell you advancement was impossible without formal training, even in such subjective disciplines.
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Was told the same thing about meditation, keep moving forward with minimal guidance though.
Which is not to say guides and gurus aren't useful, or force multipliers.
But if it were impossible, how could anyone ever become a master?
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At some point you have to admit that your founding story is either pure mythology, or that someone, at some point, did it themselves - and correctly!
Which is not to say that this isn't risky, but that's a very different argument...
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Across near enough every discipline people who are sufficiently influential become deified, even if they consistently make the point that they're just coming up with ideas and that people should think for themselves. Some people just go with it.
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Right. Buddhists will lecture you on the contents of the founding texts, many of which have the Buddha going like:
"You motherfuckers. You absolute knaves. Will you just stop asking me questions and DO this shit instead?"
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"You gonna go sit under a tree until you get it? NO? What the fuck is with you people?!?"
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Rudolf Steiner made the point that what he was saying may have been (he said) mythically inspired, but it was still his interpretation and his ideas and not a set of rules to follow. So the Steiner schools all say that they're "inspired" by his ideas and follow them religiously.
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Shit like this is why I'm most concerned with hitting the break point in the practice I'm looking for, and getting a few others through.
Humans are too dumb to be trusted to retain ideas past more than one or two degrees of separation