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OUR TEACHERS ARE EVERYWHERE
By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
Everywhere, and in everything, the teachers of life live and breathe. They patiently wait to deliver to us the uncountable lessons of this varied existence we call our being.
The Zen quote of "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear," is not only valid, but also verifiable. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that the teacher does appear, just as can God Itself, in any and all forms imaginable.
Just as the notion of God eventually crumbles when we try and keep Him confined to the glorified human form (i.e. bearded white Man in the heavens) so it is with the matter of our teachers. They are by no means always coming to us in human form.
We learn from others. We learn from their words, their actions, their impressions left on us by them as we interact in our world. We learn from emotions of love, and fear, and everything in between, as others and ourselves play them out.
We learn from both formal and informal study. From library books, to even some television programming, all are teachers in their differing disguises.
We learn by observing life in general. Nature has much to say about it to us, as we are listening, watching to hear it.
In the silence come the meanings and purposes of life, and as we go deep within those inner places, we hear so much more than the quiet noises of a room.
Even a dream can bring an important understanding up close to us. In this way we learn from within our own mind. Whoever is in the occupation of our dreaming world becomes our personal professor.
A popular idea is that we are tapping into a stream of thought inside of our minds when in rest. So who teaches there? Who knows?
Intuition is a wonderful teacher. Our intuition - some call it the "God in us" - is constantly sending signals about what is going on in our world.
As we learn to listen, we stand a chance to quite naturally grow in wisdom and love, as intuition (and the awareness and enlightenment that is attached to it) is a great and loving teacher.
Some of our lessons take an instant to learn; we "get" them in a flash. Others of them come to us slowly, quite often over several decades of unveiling. Still more emerge in small, day-to-day increments, and we steadily get the meaning behind the story.
Regardless of how the lessons come, they do come, and it is because of the nature of life itself that I believe they are continually emerging into our understanding.
Life, the classroom, is a grand place we never graduate from until the last and final day of being a participating member of it.
When we close our eyes for the ultimate time, it might be that we have shut ourselves off to what life had in Mind for us, but we can't rule the fact out that death could be a kind of graduation day, too.
We needn't be concerned that some of those in religion insist that death is something else than what we think; when they suggest that it's judgment time, or the departure to either heaven, or hell, they are only guessing, too.
Neither should we be worried that some who are scientifically minded assure us that when we are dead, we are just dead; we know that the body dies, but no one, not even their greatest minds, knows about the matters of mind, spirit and soul after this life is lived.
It very well could be that the sum totals of our teaching are pre-requisites for whatever is to come beyond this life. After all, if a person who is steadily declining in a physical way as he approaches his "old" age, yet has grown and evolved spiritually and emotionally and mentally as he has grown old, comes to die, and in that death it is all over, then and there, it would seem to a thinking person that this might be a large kind of a waste.
To have come into all of that wisdom and evolution, and then to lose it all
I just don't think it works like that.
From the cradle to the grave, we are learning, growing, spiraling more and more upwards
but for what? It only makes sense that it is for some higher reason. But even if it's not (and again, no one really knows for sure), we are more tuned in, less bored and immensely more rewarded as we engage in a life of continual learning.
When we really think about it, do we believe that we go through any of our days without being exposed to incredible amounts of personal learning, exposure to evolution?
It's just not realistic to see life in that way. We are here to learn. Life is here to teach.
Our oopi-gurus (everyday teachers) are everywhere.
Someone is always doing the teaching, disguised endlessly in a rainbow of cover-ups.
It's no grand leap for me to call this someone the God of Everything that is anything.
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