How to find a teacher Part 3
As a rule, higher-quality communities harder to get (although this is not always the case). For example, a community of methodologists and philosophers in education is quite closed and conservative, people there are often academic way. That’s why I decided at the age of 22 to abandon the diploma, it was difficult to go there, but the quality of the people, contacts, discussions definitely were worth it. The best communities operate on the principle of mutual assistance, so try to find something you can be useful to other participants.
The risk of communities to consider: they are often “pupate” in their own ideas and beliefs. Even frequent discussions can revolve around a single assumption, mutually supported by group approval. In other words, any good community is inherent in some degree of sectarianism and conformity. Be careful, learn to be critical to supporting ideas. A good “vaccination” — interact with people from different (and opposing) points of view to see the whole picture.
Enter the “free search”. You probably know the feeling when you meet “the right person in the right place at the right time”? This perfect match when you understand each other and connect on a deep level when you are ready and learn a lot and have much to learn? Usually such meetings in our lives a little bit.
Open yourself to new experiences — not as easy as it seems.
For six months in India, I visited more than 20 places and met dozens of people, each of which was so “perfect coincidence”. It sounds almost mystical.
The Pali texts have often repeated the lesson: “nobody friend, nobody’s enemy, but everyone is your teacher”.
A generic method to force “the universe to answer you” I don’t know. In my case it was a complete openness to experience, a shift in the position of “I know nothing”, the willingness to listen and hear the world, people, events, serious dive into new practices, the confidence in the world and “voice inside”. To me, a hardcore rationalist, it was difficult and unusual, but this approach gave me the most profound lessons of the last year.
Find partners for joint self-education. The roots “together” and “self” are not contradictory. Boys born in the 90s, you probably remember how in the childhood we together dealt with computers: how to install games to fight off the virus, to crack pirated software (“sterile” ecosystem like the App Store did not exist, so any PC user had to shamanism with the computer). Each of us was a cheerleader, someone slightly more advanced user, but the joint effort was to experiment, to transfer knowledge, to try and learn.
One head is good; two is better.
When I began to study pedagogy and education, my colleagues and I together immersed in this topic “from scratch”: do not understand complex methodological texts together, made mistakes, shared each other’s discoveries, discussed the hypothesis, talked about discoveries from meetings with important people and exchanged contacts. And, along with other criteria, it was very important.
The peculiarity of this environment is that there are no positions of “teacher–student” or even “expert expert”. It is the position of “student–student” (or “peer-to-peer”), in which all participants are in the “don’t know” (although I do not know they are different things), and willing to learn together and support each other.
Try to find in your environment not only teachers and masters, but like you, students. And move together as long as necessary; while you pleasure to learn together. This opens up a magical, often hidden, social aspect of self, which most of us have forgotten.
This is 9 of the 18 ways that we expect. How many of them really do you use? The following articles talk more about where to find internship, how not to get lost among the hundreds of open resources when you should look at the courses and when to go to the edge of the world to learn.