In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind.

July 25, 2010

What do you look for in a teacher?

Ken: As we usually do, or I usually do here. I’d like to spend the next hour in conversation with you and the subject for conversation I’m going to suggest for this morning is: What do you look for in a teacher? Now, earlier this week, I put up a blog post outlining, I won’t say all the different roles a teacher can provide, but I named about nine, I think. But for some reason the Huffington Post labeled it seven. A person couldn’t count. But a teacher, in the ordinary sense, is someone who provides you with or teaches you a body of knowledge or skills or capabilities and so forth. But then you have the therapist role helping you heal from emotional wounds, the consultant role helping you solve problems. You have the guru, somebody who elicits in you certain states of experience which you develop in your practice, mentor, coach, preacher, etc., etc. So what do you look for in a teacher and in general, what are your questions about relating to a teacher? So we have a microphone up here and we can just start anywhere. And if nobody wants to start then we have other methods.

Student: I think if we look at it in sort of a spiritual sense, which is one of the reasons why we’re here, I think we don’t have a history in our culture of knowing what a spiritual guide or a teacher or an assistant would be. And as a result, we’ve stepped into some very messy situations and we allow them a lot of different types of control than we’re used to. And it doesn’t seem to work often.

Ken: Well, perhaps. I think actually in our culture we do have a long tradition of spiritual teachers. And, for various reasons, that whole tradition has largely been ignored. In the Catholic tradition, you had spiritual direction and these would be sometimes priests, sometimes monks, sometimes lay people whom you would consult with or talk with, who would guide you in your spiritual practice. They would direct you and that’s a very old tradition. There have been attempts within the Episcopalian tradition to revive that but with dubious, very dubious success. In the Jewish tradition, they have a number of different models, including the rabbi and others, someone with whom you can talk with and elaborate and deepen your understanding. But I think it possibly points to some of the problems that you’re referring to that we have to look at historically. Okay. It was the 60s. You had a bunch of young people who went over to the East. These were the most radical, extreme segments of Western society and what did they seek out? The most conservative people in eastern societies, because the religious people are generally the most conservative. So you had this extraordinary interaction between the most radicalized and forward thinking of Western society, with the most conservative, traditional thinking of eastern society.

Now, there were a few psychological issues in play there. A lot of these people were coming from extreme forms of alienation from their families and their culture and so they looked to their spiritual teachers to be everything. And rather than looking at these different roles, they sought them to be absolutely everything in one role. That’s where I think a lot of the problems arose. They would look to the teachers to be more than they could possibly be. They had to be a super teacher, a super consultant. I mean, they expected them to be able to solve all of the world’s problems, particularly their own, and elicit in them extraordinary states of experience and train them in various skills, etc. But as I trained in the Tibetan tradition, I came to appreciate that within the Tibetan tradition there were all kinds of different teachers. And when we were training for the three year retreat, we had much more exposure to that because I was with Kalu Rinpoche in France, but we would have people who would teach us the musical instruments, and people who would teach us the liturgies and people who would teach us this, and people who teach us that.

And this is how it actually was in a Tibetan monastery. You had all of these different teachers and they had different roles. And within the monastic ordination, every monk has five teachers. Basically each one of them is responsible for a different part of the monks education and training, assimilating them into the monastic tradition. And when you try to get it all in one person—going back, say to the idea of the nuclear family—that’s where things start to fall apart, because nobody can meet all of those expectations. So this is why I think it’s really important to be clear about what we are seeking from a teacher in ourselves, so that we can form the right relationship and approach it the right way. Then we can actually get what we’re looking for and take into account the inevitable. I mean, everybody is human at some level. Nobody is a god or anything like that. You follow. All right. If there aren’t any other questions. I have my own methods here. Could you hand me the microphone, please? Now we’ll just go around. Marie. You can start.

Student: Oh, you just mentioned the nuclear family and I thought even that’s kind of a modern invention because we used to have extended families. You didn’t depend on your two parents for your whole, you know, your models for life. You had this whole extended family of the aunts and uncles. Do you think that was a healthier model than the nuclear family?

Ken: I think in many respects it is a healthier model for a couple of reasons. One is there are more possibilities of finding role models. You aren’t stuck with one. There are also intrinsic protection mechanisms worked into that. There was much more likelihood that there was somebody that you could really trust to go to if you were confused or in trouble or having trouble with somebody else in the extended family, like Uncle John is always bothering me. You could go to somebody else and say that and they would say, “Yes, well, we’ll take care of you.”

Student: So we really need a network of teachers.

Ken: I think so. There are certain areas where a single individual is very, very important because there’s a very deep level of trust and the emotional connection is very important. And that’s primarily going to come with a single relationship with another person. It can’t be with a group of people. So it’s that hard opening to another person, say the principal teacher in this respect. Because that allows you to open your heart to them. And that allows you to take in things that you couldn’t ordinarily because your heart is open. It also incurs risk of course because wherever your heart is open it can be broken. But that emotional connection is very, very important. And so people I know have almost all had a very, very deep emotional connection with one or other teachers in the course of their lives. They’ve been very, very important people to them but in addition they have usually studied with and learned different things from many, many different people. Yeah. Okay.

Devotion, idealization, and the limits of a teacher

Student: Yes, a few different things occurred to me. One is that in the Theravada tradition, thinking more in terms of a spiritual friend, you know.

Ken: Yeah. This kalayanamitra, it’s a mistranslation. One of the possible translations is a spiritual friend. And I’m not quite sure why this was seized upon. I think it may have been Western egalitarian notions that caused them to choose that one. That kalayanamitra, that spiritual friend, is a very, very heavy-handed friend. [Laughter] And should be a very, very heavy-handed friend. The challenge that I have with that is that it denotes a false level of equality. We go to someone because we don’t understand or know something, and we think they know something more than we do, and that’s why we study with them. Right. And it may be that a friendship develops out of that, but that actually is incidental to our learning. Now, the quality of emotional connection doesn’t actually depend on friendship. It depends on a certain alignment of chemistry, no doubt, and that’s important. The notion of spiritual friend as people often interpret it, I find, gets people into all kinds of troubles because they find themselves looking for a friend first and a teacher second, and that rarely works.

Student: I was thinking why, in the past and even now, that was attractive to me. Part of it was the resistance to having more of a devotional teacher and then also somebody that you could hold up as this perfect being.

Ken: Well. Let’s talk about both of those separately. Whether you are studying violin, painting or spiritual practice or mathematics, you’re going to have devotion to your teacher. You’re going to have devotion to your teacher. Why? Because this person represents what you want to know. And if you don’t have devotion to what you yourself want to know then it’s going to be very difficult for you to learn. And so, when we talk about devotion, we aren’t talking about a blind, abdication of personal responsibility, saying, you know, “I am yours, do with me what you want.” That’s not really what devotion is about. Devotion is a heartfelt sense of respect and appreciation because this person is really important to what is most important to you in your life. Okay, now, the second thing you said about putting this person up on a pedestal or regarding them as perfect. How many of you want to have the perfect father or the perfect mother? Yeah, we all do, right. So we’re always looking for that and when we run into someone and they have these extraordinary qualities and abilities, etc., maybe they just make more sense than anybody else we met up to that point. All of that stuff comes out of us, and so we tend to put them up on a pedestal and we may be very strongly encouraged to do so by the surrounding culture or the norms of that particular group.

But, again, when we do that we are abdicating our own intelligence and our own common sense. Now we go and study with that person or we go and learn from a person because they know something about what is important to us individually. And the best way to approach such a person is through respect and appreciation. That’s what I meant by devotion. But are they going to be perfect? I mean, when we first went east in the 60s, we expected these people, you know, to know everything like they were super PhDs in absolutely everything. It was ridiculous. I remember when I first came to LA, I was active in the inter-sangha groups, which came out of another centre here in LA. One of the really big obstacles for many of the ethnic Buddhists—like the Cambodian and Vietnamese and Laotian buddhist communities—was that in the villages in those countries, the head Buddhist priest was the wise man of the village. And as the wise man he knew everything about the village and was the best man frequently to make decisions, about things and to give advice. So these communities would come over and find themselves as refugee communities, settling here in LA. And they would go to this person, but this person didn’t know anything about the politics or the building codes or, the legal structure and would give terrible advice.

And so many of these communities had to learn to develop a whole board of advisors of all of these people who had different areas of expertise so the community could thrive. They couldn’t depend on one person anymore because the society in which we live is so much more complex. And that’s why I say when we expect one person to know everything, it’s just an abdication of our own intelligence. We know how complex our society is. We know that no matter how smart you are you only know about one small segment of things. You don’t know all the legal things. You don’t know all the financial things. You don’t know all the scientific aspects. You don’t know all the medical aspects. We go to different people for these different things. In earlier societies, that wasn’t the case. It was possible for 1 or 2 people to know almost everything. And one of the great teachers of the 19th century, many of whose books I’ve studied myself, knew everything that there was to know in Tibetan culture, literally. And he wrote an encyclopedia, which covered the whole breadth of Tibetan learning. It’s been translated into English, almost all of it. Can you imagine one person writing such a book today about the breadth of Western learning? Impossible. We have Wikipedia instead.

Learning from someone and having a teacher

Student: I don’t want to take too much time but we’re such specialists now, you know, in everything here. But one of the lucky things, I think, is a lot of our teachers, I don’t know if it’s lucky or not but about the issue of trust towards our teachers. A lot of Western teachers have some degree in therapy or psychology. That’s one thing, engineering or something. And then the the other thing I just wanted to bring up is that for for many of us, our teachers are people we haven’t even met, you know, online. We’ve listened to their podcasts. So like, Ajahn Amaro is he my teacher? I don’t know, I’ve never met him.

Ken: So those are some interesting points that you raise. I’m going to be a little picky here. I think it is fair to say that we can’t really regard somebody as our teacher unless we have actual interaction with them. Which isn’t to mean that we can’t learn something from somebody. I mean, you listen to Ajahn Amaro, who’s excellent and I know him and I think he’s very good. You listen to him online and you learn a great deal from that. And that’s very little different from reading a book in a certain sense. I mean, one of the formative influences on my approach to translation was Wittgenstein. And so I read and I continue to read Wittgenstein because I just like the way he thinks. But I’ve never met him, I never will. He’s dead, he died in 1954. But I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him, but I don’t in that sense, regard him as a teacher, but in the sense that I’m talking about a teacher, it is someone you actually have interaction with.

And the reason I think that’s important is that when you listen to a podcast or read a book or watch a video or whatever, we have all of these different possibilities open to us. Basically, we’re taking that and it’s coming into our world, and that can be very helpful to us. We get lots of ideas and may be able to apply them all over the place, etc., and make real use of them. But it’s coming into our world. When you actually interact with someone it’s not so simple because now you’ve got two different worlds. You have the teacher’s world and the student’s world and now you find out whether anything you’ve learned actually has real meaning because you’re interacting with another world. At the same time, the teacher, because they have an actual student in front of them, has to relate to that person. So now it becomes something that’s dynamic and awake in the moment, and not something that’s been written in a book or or recorded, etc. So I think that interaction is very, very important. Okay.

Student: That interaction that you’re talking about, I think is, difficult to find.

Ken: Difficult to find. Say a bit more about that, please.

Student: I don’t think I’ve ever had that interaction.

Ken: You’re having it right now.

Student: I’ve had a lot of teachers.

Ken: You’re having it right now.

Student: Okay.

Finding the right teacher

Ken: Yes. Now you’ve had a lot of teachers. What has happened or what hasn’t happened about that interaction?

Student: I think real teaching is a bit of a dance, Maybe my dance partners haven’t been that great, or maybe I haven’t been that great. But somehow as a partnership it hasn’t felt like … I have felt moments. So you and I have danced probably better than most.

Ken: Well, thank you, because I’m a terrible dancer. One of my students teaches now up in the Seattle area. He’s a very solid guy and actually knows a lot more about Buddhism than I do because he studied it academically, among other things. Now there are a lot of teachers in the Seattle area. But this student of mine is a very unassuming guy. And he’s discovered that there are all of these little towns around Washington where there are practicing Buddhists, but nobody ever visits them. So he’s going around these little towns and teaching periodically and having that actual interaction with people. And he finds it very rewarding because these are very interested people and they find it very rewarding because they can actually talk with someone and have the interaction that you’re describing. So yes, I would agree that finding a person that you can actually have that interaction with is not the easiest thing in the world. Some of that has to do with the star mentality that we have. You know, we always want to go to the biggest and the best, but the biggest and the best aren’t necessarily the best teachers for us. And I mean, a lot of people ask me, how do you know who your teacher is? And I have a very simple response to that. Your teacher is a person whom you will listen to even when you are completely crazy. That’s what’s most important.

And one doesn’t have to think of having just one teacher for one’s whole life. That was very often the case in Eastern societies, but those were a lot more stable societies than ours. Maybe study with a person and develop a close relationship and learn a great deal, and then it may be time to find somebody else, and so on and so on. And there’s a wonderful Zen koan about the problem with the best and the brightest as teachers. Buddha observes this woman who’s sitting in meditation and her meditation is wrong. So he says to Manjushri, “go and help her with her meditation.” Now Manjushri is a 10th-level bodhisattva, which is one short of Buddhahood. Not only that but Manjushri is the embodiment of enlightened intelligence. So this is one bright guy. So Manjushri goes over to this woman and tries to wake her up from her meditation, which is all wrong, and he tries one thing after another and can’t get anywhere. So after a while he comes back. Manjushri said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help her.” The Buddha said, “Interesting.” Then he points to a first-level bodhisattva and says, “Why don’t you go over and try?” And he goes over, sits down in front of the woman and she comes right out of her meditation. They have a nice little chat and she goes back into meditation, now it’s all right. So I hope you find a good partner.

Seeing the humanity of the teacher

Student: I’m curious as to your thoughts on the importance of knowing a teacher’s personality. Sort of on a more personal level.

Ken: That’s a very interesting question. I’d like you to expand on a little bit. Where is it coming from for you?

Student: Yeah. Over the past few years I’ve become close with the teacher, which was not the status quo that I was used to. I was used to going to a temple, listening to a teaching, taking home what I could, practicing the principles as best I could, but never really knowing whether the teacher was walking the talk. Although he was really able to help and speak well. Now as I get close to certain teachers or what have you, I’m able to see more clearly and see their humanity as well as how incredible their practice really is. So I found that very beneficial to me. But I know that’s sort of rare nowadays, to have that sort of personal interaction with teachers.

Ken: Is it rare?

Student: At least it has been for me.

Ken: Well, you remind me of a couple of things. One of the traditions in which I was trained is called the Karma Kagyu tradition in Tibet. And the head of the Karma Kagyu tradition is a figure called Karmapa: the 17th Karmapa is in India now. I knew the 16th. I met the 16th Karmapa a couple of times. He is an extraordinary individual. I mean really very, very powerful spiritually, amazing. And there’s an old saying about the Karmapa. There have been 16 or 17 of them in the course of Tibetan history and the saying goes like this. “If you see the Karmapa, you will never see the lower realms. If you live with the Karmapa, you will never see the higher realms.” The idea being that such a figure, if you just saw them and their function as a spiritual teacher, they were so inspiring. You had such devotion and openness to them that you would just progress wonderfully in your spiritual path. But if you got to know them as people, you would see that they were like people, anybody. You would lose faith in devotion. This wouldn’t be so good for your spiritual path. And there’s always this tension.

The second thing that you remind me of is a very wonderful teacher on the East Coast. Maurine Stewart a Zen teacher in Cambridge. She died some years ago, but I’ve met several people who studied with her, and they said she was just a remarkable person. She used to say that a teacher’s warts should be very visible. A teacher’s warts should be very visible because otherwise the student may feel that Buddhahood resides in the teacher. What we’re prone to in the West and probably this was the case in the East too. But what we’re very definitely prone to in the West is an idealization. We want things to be perfect and they never are. There are, in the various Buddhist traditions, very, very precise, mechanisms almost, built in to protect the spiritual relationship between the teacher and student from the inevitable foibles of the human personalities involved. Do you follow? That’s important. One of the principles on which many religions have been based for the last 2,000 or 3,000 years is a way of transcending the human condition. And this has been largely responsible for the idealization that I’m talking about. What is interesting is that—certainly since the middle of the 19th century, but it may go back earlier than that, I’m not sure—but we’re really in the latter part of the 20th century. And now we’re really encountering this, that there is a global shift in the concept of religion taking place, and it’s moving from transcending the human condition to embracing the human condition.

This is a very, very far-reaching, very significant shift in how we conceive of religion. And it’s also going to make a very significant difference in how we relate to teachers, because we will no longer see as the ideal teacher someone who seems to transcend the human condition. We will see the ideal teacher as someone who somehow embraces the human condition with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies and everything like that as completely as possible. And that’s going to cause us to look for things a little differently. So, does any teacher absolutely live up to the ideals of their tradition? Probably not. I remember talking with Jack Kornfield about Ajahn Chah. And Ajahn Chah suffered quite a bad stroke late in his life, he was severely debilitated by it. And the monks at the monastery tended to him and took care of him, and after several months he recovered quite a bit of his functionality. And Jack told me this, he said, “You know, being a naive Westerner, I asked him, ‘Well, couldn’t you just transcend that with all your heart?’ And Ajahn Chah just looked at me very kindly and he said, ‘You have no idea how difficult it is.’ “

We are in the end human beings. We are flesh and blood, we are in this body and things break down and things happen. In my own practice, for better or worse—and you may not wish to follow in these footsteps at all—but I pretty well dropped any notion of some kind of idealized state. I just asked myself a very simple question, which some of you who have been here with me before have heard me say, “How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time?” That’s the only question I ask. And for instance, just as you can probably hear from my voice, I had the flu for the last few days, not the greatest experience, but there’s nothing to do but be sick. And when you’re sick and you fight being sick, it just makes it worse. So, how can I experience having the flu and be at peace at the same time? I didn’t do too badly actually. I even got better in time to come here. But that’s a very simple example. And some people are able to take this to extraordinary depths where they can experience extraordinary pain, physical or emotional and be at peace with it. I think that’s amazing. But it’s the same question. Okay.

Trust, choice, and what a teacher may ask of you

Student: I think a lot of the time with teachers, it’s kind of like, what you can get and then leave the rest. A lot of the time, whether we click or not with the teacher is in our perception, like it’s a choice. You know what we choose to get from them or learn from them. It’s a choice a lot of the time.

Ken: What’s your question?

Student: Wouldn’t you agree with that? That it’s in our perception whether or not we click or what we can gain from them.

Ken: The illusion of choice is often an indication of a lack of freedom. I quite often say to people who study with me, “Take what is useful and throw the rest away.” A lot depends on what you are looking for and your relationship with said individual teacher. Because teachers who are worth their salt will often present you with a possibility that you won’t want to take it all. Because to take that possibility means to let go of who you think you are and who you have been. Now, the reason I gave you that quotation about choice is that it’s not a rational decision. You can’t know what the possibilities are. You can’t make a rational choice. But the possibility is presented to you. Now, what do you do? And what you do is going to be far more based on your emotional relationship than it is on any amount of reason. Which is why it’s very important if you’re going to study deeply with another person to make sure that you trust this person because you’re trusting them with a lot.

Back in the early 70s, I had interaction with a group in Montreal. This was a cult with a charismatic leader who made my skin crawl. But I had to have interaction with him because of the situation I was in. And he had a bunch of faithful acolytes, some of whom—when the cult, as cults inevitably do, fell apart—went on and studied with other teachers and became really very good practitioners. But this was their first teacher and he wasn’t a nice guy at all. He was quite exploitative. So I’m not sure how much choice you have when you get really down to it.

I’ll give you another example from my own experience. After I finished the three-year retreats, I had my life nicely set up in Canada. And then I got a letter from my teacher, “Go to Los Angeles, do not pass go.” So I came to Los Angeles, that’s how I ended up here. There was never any choice in my mind because of the nature of the relationship you have with your teacher and, in the Tibetan tradition, there wasn’t any choice. He had given me all of these teachings, and now he wanted me to go to Los Angeles, that was it. When I got to Los Angeles, after a few months, I developed a number of people as advisors and they asked me interesting questions like, “Why did you come to Los Angeles?” It took about six months of them asking me that question before I could see that yes, I had chosen to obey or do what my teacher asked me to do. But at the time I didn’t have that framework. So choice is very, very deceptive. A lot of the things we think we do out of choice, it’s not really that way. So I’d explore this quite deeply.

Student: I think that we all have many different teachers on different levels in everyday situations. But I think that one very personal teacher is really hard to find for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t know where to go to find that teacher and if we’re really supposed to seek that out or if it’s just supposed to happen naturally. And I think that a lot of people also may never have that really deep connection with a teacher on a spiritual level. Do you agree or do you have any suggestions on how to find that teacher?

Ken: Is the second question, do you agree? You’re right. It is difficult. I don’t think it’s actually a matter of lack of availability. There are many people who are capable of guiding people in different forms of practice, Buddhist or otherwise. That may not have always been the case, but particularly in a place like Los Angeles, I don’t think there’s any major city in America now, where lack of availability is really an issue. How bad do you want it?

What are you prepared to give up?

Student: I’ve been looking for a long time, so I guess pretty bad. I understand what you’re saying though.

Ken: Then I have to ask you another question. What are you prepared to pay for it? And I’m not talking about money.

Student: I understand time and commitment and searching and looking.

Ken: Maybe more.

Student: It’s a good question.

Ken: Thank you. [Laughter]

Student: I guess it depends on what the price is. You know, when that time comes.

Ken: Everything you’ve been and done, everything you’ve been and done.

Student: If it’s presented to me at that time.

Ken: No conditions, no conditions.

Student: Okay?

Ken: Okay. What?

Student: I mean, yes, I’m willing that, would I, yes.

Ken: Then you shouldn’t have a problem.

Student: Really? Okay.

Ken: Think of what you just said to me. You’re willing to give up everything you’ve ever been and done without any conditions.

Student: To find that person. That would be that connection. Yeah, I think so.

Ken: Yeah, that’s pretty deep. You shouldn’t have a problem.

Student: Continuing with this line of thought. I’ve gone into situations naively where it’s like, oh yeah, I want to do this. And then I found out the price is higher than I was willing to pay. But now I think I’m smarter in that I know what resistance I will run into but that makes me hesitate. I guess that’s a statement, not a question.

Ken: So do I agree?

Student: Okay. I’ll ask a question.

Ken: Thank you.

Being open to how the relationship develops

Student: People such as yourself particularly, but maybe others too, are capable, I believe, of teaching in a lot of different capacities. Such as possibly a meditation teacher, or you do business consulting and possibly a lot of other things. Is it the responsibility—I think this is an obvious yes—is it the responsibility of the prospective student, if they go to someone that possibly can wear a lot of hats, do they say, “I’m looking for this”? And would that indicate that it would probably be restricted to that area?

Ken: I have a very good friend. He came to my classes when I first started teaching here in LA. He’s kind of a strange guy. He would ask these questions, which I could barely understand. Even though they were in very ordinary English, I just couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. After a year or so, I realized this guy knew a hell of a lot more than he was letting on. I started learning tai chi from him. And in the course of that we evolved into a relationship. So over the next 12 years he and I met almost every week and exchanged our various spiritual technologies. Because he had the keys to unlock where I was stuck, and I had the keys to unlock where he was stuck. This was a very, very fruitful exchange. I bring this up because it was something that evolved. Evolution is a tricky business. Number one it is unpredictable, number two, if you start off one way, you prevent a lot of other things from having any chance of evolving. So your questions are very difficult to answer because by approaching a teacher in a certain way, you may be closing off as many doors as you’re opening and you have no way of knowing. This is extremely unhelpful I realize, but the relationship with the teacher is very important. And I think it rests in about equal parts on both teacher and student being open to possibilities.

Suzuki Roshi was a great Zen teacher. He founded Zen Center in San Francisco. In 1970 he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, he died in 1971. So about nine months. Not really enough time for an orderly transition. And he had invested a great deal of his time and energy in training people to be Zen monks and priests. But when word spread of his cancer he received letters from literally hundreds, probably thousands of people that had studied with him in San Francisco. This was a close associate of Suzuki Roshi who told me this. As he read those letters he said, “Oh, these were my real students.” Because of his training he felt that his real students were the monastics. But when he got all these letters from laypeople, seeing what they had done with his teaching and their practice, and what a difference it made in their lives. He realized, “Oh, these were my real students.” And that’s why I say it’s really important. Openness to possibility is important on both the part of the teacher and student. Teachers tend to think in certain ways. Students tend to think in certain ways. Well, actually neither of them are perfect. So yes, as a student it’s very important for you to be as clear as possible about your intention, which goes back to this woman’s questions. At the same time you have no idea how things are actually going to evolve, which goes back to your questions, that actually is the nature of things. Okay, last one, because we’re at 12:30.

Student: Do we have to ask about spiritual teachers? Do we have to ask about spiritual teachers?

Ken: I’m open.

How do you become a good teacher?

Student: I’ve never had a spiritual teacher, so I don’t have any questions about them. But I have to teach undergraduates in biology classes every year, and I was actually just thinking, as I was driving up here, how hard it is. I was wondering if you could talk about how you become a good teacher. I could give them all the answers and give them all As; they wouldn’t learn anything, but they’d be very happy. So how do you inspire and motivate and educate? How do you discipline people without making them hate you?

Ken: Oh, don’t be at all concerned about them hating you. Right Nancy? I mean, that’s the last thing you should be concerned about. In fact, there are many teachers who are hated by their students until many years later, and then they’re greatly admired. And I think this is generally true whether it’s biology or spiritual practice or whatever. Challenge your students, make them stretch. At first they will hate you for it and then they will love you. But both of those are incidental. You want to impart knowledge, you want them to actually learn it. The only way that they will do that is by having to do things that they haven’t done before and those are challenges. So the more you challenge your students, the more they will learn. That’s what I suggest. Okay. Right.

We should close here. Thank you very much for your interest. And in closing, let’s just sit quietly for a few moments.

Consider whatever good has come out of this for you. And as you consider that good don’t try to hold on to it but let it spread to everything you know in your own world. And form the wish that wherever it touches, it awakens, it awakens some goodness in others. [Gong] Thank you.