Listening to a teacher with open heart and mind is a skill that can be chosen. I know this because it’s a thing that I always choose to do, and it’s something that I see most the people around me resist. I always wonder why?
Every single person I meet knows something that I don’t know. I’m always encountering people with interesting areas of expertise. When I do I choose to learn. Like, when I decided to move out into the woods and live in nature I found old guys who had spent their lives doing exacly that. So I learned from them. It was a state of unquestioning, grateful, learning.
One time I decided to take singing lessons online. So I found this guy who was a master vocal teacher and I signed up for his online course. I simply assumed, as I went through the course, that I was learning from somebody who knew something that I didn’t know. His job was to teach. My job was to learn. So my attitude towards the training was one of respect and gratitude for the teacher. The course was very expensive and I struggled to afford it. The course took a lot of time and I struggled to keep up. The thought of blaming the teacher for my difficulties never once occured to me.
Over time I got hired by this same fellow to do tech-support for his online business and I’m constantly amazed at the attitudes I encounter. People write in who think they know more than the teacher. They write beligerant epistles telling him how he should be teaching them.
That’s not learning.
What is the resistence? It must be an intense feeling of “Not good enough.” So we have to pretend we know everything.
But we don’t have to be good enough to learn! We just have to trust.
What is real trust?
Christianity has skewed our understanding of trust. We’ve been conditioned to believe trust is a thing we have to muster up. Trust in Jesus no matter what or you’ll go to hell!
What kind of trust is that? That’s mental prison and confusion… not trust.
Real trust doesn’t need to be mustered up. It’s so natural it’s not even seen.
Think about the person who taught you to ride a bicycle. You simply trusted that they could teach you… no matter how many times you fell, they got you back up and pushed until suddenly you were riding.
The idea that you were trusting them probably never even occured to you. It was just part of the deal.
How many of us have, ourselves, taught a child to ride a bicycle? Same thing. Bet you didn’t even think about it. You trusted it was doable, that you could teach it, and that this exact child could do it. Falls were nothing but a scraped knee. Try again, try again, try again… and suddenly off they go.
That’s the trust we are missing. That’s how we learn from a teacher.
We are good enough to ride a bicycle. We are good enough to get up in the morning. We are certainly good enough to realize who we are, to drop the veil, to see the natural simplicity of our inner self awareness.
We don’t have to be good enough to know who we are. Enlightenment isn’t an accomplishment.
What if we were actually good enough right this moment? What if ugly, and old, and sad, and broken was good enough?
What if we don’t smile nicely at everything? Do we have to fix that first?
Perfection is always ahead of us. Maybe we are pretty wonderful right now, but it’s never enough. More wonderfulness can be imagined sometime in the future. Imagination is endless. It’s a carrot on a string we can never grasp.
Do we have to attain perfection before attaining perfection?
What if there was no magic bullet?
Enlightenment teachings have been dominated by dreams of pefection. Maybe it’s one of the reasons we don’t trust teachers. But we can trust ourselves. Yes? Drop the skewed view of what we have to do to “attain” and we can start to learn. Find the most imperfect teacher ever and you’ll do great.
We have been given these stories about how enlightenment is this all powerful, all knowing, all perfect super attainment.
What if it isn’t?
What if it’s pain and misery. Would we still search for enlightenment if we didn’t have all these promises? What if we were only promised to be who we are right now? Like… who would pay for that?
How many of us are playing the game of looking the part, watching our words so we sound spiritual, battling our thoughts to only let the good ones in?
How many can trust, as a given, that they are capable of enlightenment? That it’s your birthright?
Do that and you’ll be dancing with roses. So sing along…