10 September 2014

Teacher Beware

In 1967 I studied the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharishi. His advice was to keep asking oneself the question "Who am I". This led me into a lot of soul searching. I persisted with this enquiry for thirty years, did a lot of research and discovered a lot about myself.

In 1997 I started studying A Course in Miracles. In the introduction to the Manual for Teachers book the question became "What am I". This question, and the teachings in A Course in Miracles, radically changed my perspective and made sense of what I had learned during my "Who am I" phase.

"To teach is to learn, so that the teacher and learner are the same. It (the course) also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well."

"To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and we demonstrate that we believe one or the other is true all the time. From our demonstration others learn, and so do we. The question is not whether we will teach, for in that there is no choice... we choose what we want to teach on the basis of what we want to learn...We cannot give to someone else, but only to ourself, and this we learn by teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what we believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to us a chance to teach others what we are, and what they are to us."

"The curriculum we set up is therefore determined exclusively by what we think we are, and what we believe the relationship of others is to us."

"It is our mission to become perfect here, and so we teach perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until we have learned it."

See more here.

One of the expressions that I queried a lot was "We'll always be learning." This is true if we believe that we are here living a separate experience. An exercise I teach in Peace of Mind Healing is to get us to stay in peace from when we wake up in the morning for as long as we can. When we realise that we are not in peace anymore ask ourselves "Why did I decide to take myself out of peace?" The day that we spend the whole day in peace is the day that we have stopped learning and realise that we are perfect.

We are always teaching. Beware what we teach!

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