There was this underlying idea running in my mind about how some people look for teachers in their life. People who can help them evolve and grow, someone who can be the guiding presence in the journey. And i had a thought about how we approach this idea today as opposed to how it was approached in the distant past perhaps.
Imagining any situation today where someone seeking to learn, found a person who they wanted to learn from, i can only see the student asking that person “Will you be my teacher”. It sounds like an innocuous statement. On looking deeper, it seems like the statement is shifting the responsibility of the learning on to the teacher. By asking, be my teacher, it is assigning responsibility to the teacher to be the one to shift knowledge from their experience into the seeker’s experience. In the meantime, the seeker can rest, un-perturbed and un-concerned about anything, seemingly open to everything and allowing everything to be given onto themselves. The student’s mind is primed in this situation to “accept” anything that is given. The unspoken truth here is that it will ignore anything that is not explicitly given.
The subtle difference that came up is the way stories tell us of how seeker’s in the past addressed their teachers. More or less, it was on the lines of “Please take me as your disciple/apprenctice”. Here the responsibility or role assignment is only to the seeker. The charge of learning rests with the learner. The responsibility of the “teacher” here is only to accept that this person is going to be playing the role of “student” and go about their life, allowing the student to observe, and learn. In this way, the student is not resting, but active in the pursuit of anything and everything the teacher can expose them to. It is not a sense of “give me the knowledge”, rather “let me see the knowledge and i will pursue it”. This mindset can help learn a lot more and a lot deeper. The student’s mind in this case is charged with “pursuit” of knowledge. Even if it catches just a glimpse of something, it will work at capturing it. Nothing needs to be explicit, everything is an opportunity and a gift to learn.
This is just one example of how the modern world has programmed us into these very subtle ways of shifting responsibility away from ourselves and to others who we assign “roles” in our life. This, then allows us to “relax” and “chill” and perhaps if things don’t work out, even “blame” others for not giving us what we need or asked for. In reality, this kind of thinking is not helping us make the best of our life and our world. So if you want something, hold yourself responsible to get it, if you want to learn something, make yourself the student and anything and anyone can be your teacher. All you need to do is observe and follow and allow learning to happen.
There is an old saying in the east that “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”. We need more people to be students in today’s world rather than asking for more teachers.
Seeking that which you desire, actively, passionately and responsibly is the best way to accumulate more experience in life. After all, the only currency we have in life is time and the only product we can truly purchase is experience. Why not spend it consciously and voluntarily?
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