Unhealthy relationships between disciples and mentors can manifest in many ways, including overdependence on the mentor, not maintaining discriminating awareness or transference and regression as known in psychotherapy.

To become more properly sensitive to others or to ourselves, we need to strengthen or to change the operating level of certain mental factors that are already present.

Liberated beings (arhats) have attained a true stopping of all the emotional obscurations, but their mental continuums still contain the cognitive obscurations.