Where are the true teachers?
In these difficult times, among the things that our culture has lost, is an unbroken tradition of passing wisdom and guidance down from the ancestors, via the older generations, to the young of today.
I was a school teacher. I’m always careful to add the qualifier that I taught in a school, because there are many kinds of teachers. There are guitar teachers, yoga teachers and karate teachers too. In my world there are also simply teachers. Teachers who teach you how to live and how to be. Often these are called meditation teachers, if they teach using the art, science, techniques and technologies of meditation. There have been books called Zen in the Art of Archery, and Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement too.
A true teacher will use many techniques to break through the rigid barriers we students put up. They try to liberate what they call our true nature, beneath the veneers of civilisation, the thinking that we know, and perhaps beneath our quests for acquisition, our flights of fear, or our muddled confusion. They show us that we already have all that is necessary — we are the direct descendants of a billion years of cooperation and success. If we can just find how to go within, we can easily discover wisdom, peace, compassion and understanding, surpassing all the books and riches that our misguided world beguiles us with.
A true teacher upsets our linear expectations, whirls us around and hurls us to a place where, having got out of our own way, we find that the world makes much more sense. Of course, having been shown the way, it is easy for our habitual mind to dismiss the insight, and quickly bury innate perfection beneath foolish worries and troubles again. Hence the process can take years, and wreak havoc with our relationships, our work and our plans. Nonetheless, a true teacher will patiently show us, again and again, how to put down our burdens and walk easily, in peace and freedom, using every crazy trick they can muster.
So where are these teachers, now in this time of humanity’s greatest need?
How do you detect a true teacher from the charlatans, the wanna-be’s, and those with voices in their own heads that may drive them on, but that make no actual sense? I was told that you judge a teacher by their students. Are they attracting and turning out well-rounded, likeable, capable people?
Our greed and our inertia threaten the viability of much of the living world. If ever there was a time to look to traditional knowledge and innate wisdom, this is certainly it.
This article also appeared in the JEP during the week ending 14 December 2018
