It's hardly unexpected when the pitfalls of not having a teacher manifest, and I really don't mind it. It's good having to be careful and not be arrogant about not having a teacher/guru/master. I recognize the disadvantage at which I put myself by not having or looking for one, but I have my reasons that I've mentioned before. I opine there's a karmic basis for my attitude, and I also recognize the advantages of not having a teacher. Such as making mistakes. Lots of mistakes, but learning from them myself. 

For the past year and a half or so, I've been pretending to do "ear training", but for a while I've suspected that it's just been an excuse to listen to more K-pop. Basically I've been playing bass along with K-pop songs learning the root progressions and singing along with the root movements, concentrating on the intervals and trying to internalize and remember how they sound. Although I have noticed some progress, it's the laziest ear training possible.

Playing along with songs is marginally effective, if not useless. Admitting the real goal is to listen to more K-pop, the better way to pretend it's "ear training" is to not play along with a song, but rather listen to the movement and only play a note after hearing it. If you make a mistake guessing the interval, it's obvious and you know it, clap your hands. If you're playing along and make a mistake, you just kind of fudge over it and go on and there's zero mental correction. And playing along with a song, eventually I'll memorize the progression in my hands and my ear does nothing. Focusing on interval-to-interval, I force my ear to work and suddenly I'm making mistakes unless I learn the intervals aurally.

Real ear training would involve a better method that I would've found frustrating and boring (bored = not enough motivation to be a musician; frustration = not enough talent). None of this has any basis in reality, it's all theoretical musing; just an example of how I go about figuring things out for myself. 

I don't know how I feel about this second example since it's about sitting meditation, which I've been doing long enough that I've probably had this realization many times before. And it's the most basic thing, the first thing you learn about sitting. It's about focusing on breathing, and specifically about focusing on the tip of one's nose or the nostrils to concentrate the mind on the breathing in and breathing out.

What feels like a minor revelation recently was that you have to be tenacious about it, not lazy. A typical tendency might be to find it too difficult to continually focus on the breath without the mind wandering. The teaching is once you realize the mind is wandering, just clear out the thoughts and start over concentrating on breathing. Easy. Only to find the mind is wandering again within 20 seconds. It's even easier to eventually decide it's impossible and to just give up and let the mind wander and graze in the pasture.

Being tenacious, I think, is no small part of the method. It may be the only way to get something out of it. For a while, the main focus should be to tenaciously drag (I call it 'tenacious d') the mind back to the nose and the breathing. Forget about the focus on breathing and put that on the back-burner because the mind will start wandering again. Focus just on noticing it and bringing it back whether it's 30 seconds later or halfway through the sitting session. It doesn't matter that your mind has just spent 10 minutes running through an entire discourse about some inane news article you read or something someone said yesterday, just don't get frustrated or discouraged and focus on noticing it and start over. 

Although it's properly taught that nothing should be forced in sitting practice, it should also be emphasized that some sort of mastery of the method is eventually necessary. It may be the case that at some point it's too hard to keep the mind from wandering and it's frustrating to constantly try to rein it in. Then the teachings might say it's OK to let the mind wander, but it's not OK to just accept that permanently. Going back to working on the method is necessary. An example I've used before is that it's like learning how to ride up hills on bike. The first time you try riding up a hill, you're huffing and puffing and it's the hardest thing you've done since breakfast, and you strain and struggle and make it to the top and you're sweating and swear you'll never try that again. If you accept that and never try again, you won't find out that the next time you try it, it'll be easier and you'll be totally surprised how not hard it was to get to the top. 

What's more, tenacity has rewards. You will naturally be progressively successful at bringing the wandering mind back to the breathing, and something happens and it's almost automatic that the mind stabilizes and may start going deeper into states of concentration that might be confused with drowsiness, but might be the discursive mind fading out, or even heightened alertness and awareness, even getting to a near trance state.

I'm coming across this basic realization now, which is a bit woeful considering how long I've been sitting, but it very well may be I've come across this multiple times before. Having a teacher may have helped make it stick. There are the teachings written in books, but a skillful teacher would be able to expound on anything in the books, I've mentioned before. Maybe they don't write about being tenacious because that adds pressure and risks creating a mental goal for sitting where there shouldn't be any. But once practicing what's in the books, a teacher can guide a student to the tenacious-d according to what the student will respond to and without stress or goals.

Taking this concept into my current Vajrayana reading-inspired practice (i.e., not Vajrayana practice), I can have some confidence that I'm not completely going off the rails. Despite admonishments that a guru is necessary, I'm alright with the direction of my current practice, and even if it might take longer to land a particular concept or practice, I have reason to think I'll get it close to right eventually. Maybe I'm making excuses for not pursuing a guru. But maybe I'm right and a guru isn't strictly necessary as long as there's a sincere and dedicated (albeit mine being perhaps somewhat flaky) search and plenty of time to open up instinctively to the teachings and a healthy dose of critical self-doubt. And even inspired by Vajrayana, it's important to keep the core tenets in mind, first expounded in Theravadan Buddhism, which are that nothing whatsoever should be clung to as 'me' or 'mine', and that all practices should be in furtherance of reducing suffering.

Even if I were told by some mystical augur that I'm advanced enough that I would be guaranteed to attain enlightenment in this lifetime if I sought out a guru, I think I wouldn't do it. Because then enlightenment just became a goal to be attained, rather than a path to follow in order to learn and discover enlightenment as a reality. To seek a guru motivated by a guarantee of certain enlightenment would be an immediate failure for me. It's a paradox, a Catch-22, a test even. I'm totally open to the guru requirement, but it's just not for me in this lifetime. If that forecloses enlightenment in this lifetime, so be it. I have no problem with that.