I sometimes see the idea that there are two valid ways of approaching Dhamma.
One is to find a teacher and follow whatever they teach - often a technique - and stay with that method until one succeeds
Another is trying different teachers and their methods until finding one that clicks.
While these two ways are common they need to be examined a bit more. The first one has an obvious fault: what if the teacher is teaching wrongly..
The second one seems to overcome that fault as one examines each teacher (or sometimes a method) and can eventually find the right one by a refined experimental approach.
However, one could still end up with a wrong teaching: maybe a teacher was teaching rightly but their personal style wasn’t amenable and so they are rejected…Or none were teaching rightly and we settle for one of them anyway..
[And unusual experiences that can happen when one follows some methods is no guarantee of being on the right path- they could even lead one down a wrong path if one gives significance to them.]
Yet somehow it seems there is something in these approaches’?
After all the Canki sutta (MN 128)
In what way does one discover truth? We ask Master Gotama about the discovery of truth."
- "Here, Bharadvaja, a bhikkhu may be living in dependence on some village or town. Then a householder or a house- holder’s son goes to him and investigates him in regard to three kinds of states: [in regard to states based on greed, in regard to states based on hate, and in regard to states based on delusion: ‘Are there in this venerable one any states based on greed such that, with his mind obsessed by those states, while not knowing he might say, “I know,” or while not seeing he might say, “I see,” or he might urge others to act in a way that would lead to their harm and suffering for a long time?’ As he investigates him he comes to know: ‘There are no such states based on greed in this venerable one. The bodily behaviour and the verbal behaviour of this venerable one are not those of one affected by greed. And the Dhamma that this venerable one teaches is profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peace- ful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. This Dhamma cannot easily be taught by one affected by greed.’
However the venerable in this case is really the Buddha or one of his disciples.
The teacher, in the final sense, is the Dhamma-Vinaya, the words of the Buddha and the great disciples. Later teachers are reliable only insofar as they conform to that.
Thus meeting and discussing Dhamma with teachers is useful but we have to be prepared to question and check that what they say is in conformity with the texts.
It is worthwhile sometimes to discuss even with the ones with wrong ideas- maybe we can correct them..Or we can learn aspects of the Dhamma that we hadn’t considered well - they might be excellent at explaining metta for instance, or be very generous, even if their ideas about the path are not correct.