2006.12.17 Teaching and Learning

[Plenum]

what is this thing that we call teaching and learning?

http://www.llresearch.org/transcripts/is..._1217.aspx

You ask this day about teaching and learning, how one teaches and how one learns. That is a question of enormous subtlety. And there is a wide variety in the ways in which we could approach this subject. We shall focus upon those aspects of the question which we sense are at the heart of the interest of those who have created the question. We wish to acknowledge beforehand that our response will be incomplete.

The universe in which you and we and all that there is experience consciousness is a unitary universe. When you are teaching, you are teaching yourself. When you are learning, you are learning from yourself.

We wish to start with this very deep level of truth about teaching because, unlike many who ask about the teaching process, the energy companioning this query feels deep and spiritual in nature. Therefore, rather than focusing upon the surface of teaching, we would start at the very foundation.

You are all teachers. You cannot help but be teachers. Even if you were alone for your entire lifetime, you would be teaching yourself. Indeed, you do teach yourself. From the very beginning [of] your incarnation, you are teaching yourself what you like and what you do not like. Each observation about your preferences creates for you a more and more complex structure of opinions about yourself, in effect, by your instinctual reactions to that which is occurring in your environment. You are building intelligence as to who you apparently are.

Because of the culture in which you live, this intelligence is composed almost entirely of the things that you learn when you are conscious and alert. However, much teaching of the self by the self occurs beneath the level of alert, waking consciousness. Those levels of teaching occur when you are asleep and dreaming.

You receive a tremendous amount of material that has been processed to a certain extent by your conscious mind as you release your conscious mind and move into the deeper levels of the mind to take your rest. You also are able to open the door to those deeper levels, which are unable to communicate in words. The deeper levels of the self communicate in images, concepts, colors and various aspects of feeling. On the surface of your life, you might be experiencing a very muddy picture. It may seem to be a very chaotic present day experience. Beneath the surface of consciousness, however, there are tremendous resources available to you.

They are, in the sense of dreaming, quite automatic to a certain extent. That which is on your mind have been important to you one way or another. That day registers like a knock on the door registers to someone in the house. By the focus of your waking concerns, you knock on the door of your deeper consciousness as you gain experience in working with your dreams. And you may even remember to ask, when you are knocking at the door unconsciously by your emotions and your feelings, for good guidance, for clear guidance, for the highest and best guidance. These create a strident and focused knock upon the door that elicits clearer dreams or symbols, clearer images, and clearer feelings that come from the dreaming.