When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad…

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

To say that I love the Tao Te Ching, is to implicitly say that there is some other text or texts I do not love. Up is a part of down; left is fundamental to right; and good is vital to bad. The Tao gives rise to those individually perceived and sometimes agreed-upon definitions, but none of them define anything specific about the Tao. And I do intensely dislike reading stock market analyses and anything by Danielle Steele. The texts I love or don’t love are my texts to love or despise, and while you might agree or disagree with me about them, nothing about the Tao is affected by our discussion of them. My cultural, intellectual, emotional, and temporal preferences cannot be yours. They may be similar, but they will never be the same. We are each pregnant with an always-growing body of variables for such perfect agreement to ever happen.

That’s where a Great Teacher can make a difference. And each of us, even within our own particular set of recognized limitations, can be a Great Teacher to someone else. We can all be a Master, for a moment or many moments, in the life of another who is learning. Each person has the opportunity, many times in a lifetime, to affect the evolutionary flow of humankind in the universe, and to be agents of enlightenment for others along the way.

To wit:

Remember your favorite teachers. It might have an instructor at school, a parent, a friend, even someone- given the times in which we live- on television. Did those Great Teachers instruct you, or allow you to discover on your own? Did they you give you a point by point analysis and defense of their opinions, or did they tell parables and allow your mind to be shaped by your observations of the object under study? Don’t tell me your answer; I already know.

Great Teachers recognize the Tao; they understand something about God that enables them to trust their students in presence of the Source of All.  Great Teachers make introductions, then back out of the way so a true relationship between the student and that which is being studied, can begin. Great Teachers are bridge builders, never ditch diggers or constructors of barriers. They are not afraid of revelation, even when it differs from what they themselves might believe.

And Great Teachers don’t have to worry whether or not they have taught rightly or wrongly, correctly or mistakenly. The Tao itself has a certain remarkable, however unspecific or unpredictable way of bringing forth in a person exactly that which needs to be brought forth.

Master words..