Conversation

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As I stated earlier, you know things that I don't know and you can thus teach me those things - but you also have much more metacognitive context for all the things we both know, which provides its own kind of value.

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If two people have gone equally far into the forest but one has a more complete map (& more relevant misc. knowledge, e.g. reading stars), that person still has an advantage they can leverage. I meant something along those lines, I think.

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I find the openness of your responses as you interesting as the content of the responses. In lieu of other measures, I picked my two primary teacher according to their seniority (5+ decades), and a willingness to translate their training into a new context. (1/x)

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Your response - and other teachers I’ve asked similar questions - suggests that whilst seniority/realisation is really important for serious students, there are other factors which could have a disproportionately determinate role, on the side of both student and teacher.

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I’m really not sure by what metrics a student should measure a prospective teacher by, but I suspect it is a combination of traditional training, apparent knowledge, and applicable wisdom in dialogue. Anyway thanks for responses. I was just curious about your ideas in this area.

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I would say the simplest metric is this: are you learning? Sometimes, you will not be able to tell right away, of course.

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On the face of it that makes sense...but looking back I’ve learnt things that certainly weren’t worth learning, although I didn’t know that at the time and may have never found out.

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Yeah, but then there is the additional problem: are you qualified, in any capacity, to say if a teacher is good or not, or are you kidding yourself? I think we are all kidding ourselves at least some of the time, on that particular topic.

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Scratch that. We are kidding ourselves in more ways than that.

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I take the advice of a wiser man than I on this - there are always much bigger fish in the sea, and today’s enlightenment is tomorrow’s mistake. Best to attempt to find well trained teachers (w/ lots of retreat time) and learn until it’s clear that they’re reliably inappropriate.