The role of teaching
and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world.
The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the
learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner
rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded
as a special activity in which one engages only a relatively small
proportion of one's time.
The course, on the
other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher
and learner are the same. It 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 you demonstrate that you
believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration,
others learn and so do you.
The question is not
whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose
of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing
what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn.
You cannot give to
someone else, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but
a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method
of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must
be to you a chance to teach others what you are and what they are
to you. No more than that, but also never less.
The curriculum that
you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think
you are and what you believe the relationship of others is to you.
In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally
unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible
not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really
teach and therefore learn. To this the verbal content of your teaching
is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it or it may not. It is
the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you.
Teaching but reinforces
what you believe about yourself.
Its fundamental purpose
is to diminish self doubt. This does not mean that the self you
are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you
think is real is what you teach.
This is inevitable.
There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise? Everyone
who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow
it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself
that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the world. What
else, then, would its curriculum be?
Into this hopeless
and closed learning situation which teaches nothing but despair
and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons
of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete. Except
for God's teachers, there would be no hope of salvation, for the
world of sin would seem forever "real." The self-deceiving
must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?
This is a manual
for the teachers of God. They are not perfect or they would
not be here.
Yet it is their mission
to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over
in many, many ways until they have learned it. And then they are
seen no more, although their thoughts remain a source of strength
and truth forever.
Who are they?
How are they chosen?
What do they do?
How can they work out their own
salvation and the salvation of the world?
