Teaching meditation is impossible

Teaching meditation is impossible. It's the "no-teaching" that opens students to meditation. The teacher sets up a situation, a space for meditation. Beyond that, the teacher can inspire and guide students into meditation with a few words and personal example. Teaching meditation is like repeatedly making invitations to a party. Students do what they do - each in a different way. 

Deepest Teaching

Work of the Heart

Edge.org

I strongly recommend paying a visit to an exciting intellectual movement and website: Edge.org 
Here's the short description top of their website:

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, 

seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, 

put them in a room together, 

and have them ask each other 

the questions they are asking themselves.

Road to Nowhere - A Lakota Teaching

1972, the following are the words of Lakota prophet John Fire Lame Deer published in the book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions.

"Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They don't use their brains, and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don't use the knowledge the spirit has put into every one of them; they are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere -- a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they'll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It's a quick, comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads to. I've seen it. I've been there in my vision, and it makes me shudder to think about it."

(Quote contributed by Marianne Henry.)

Speaking From a New Place

THE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

My wife and I were enjoying the calm, soothing ambiance of my favorite Japanese restaurants, eating our favorite dishes and talking about the philosophical issues of life. It has been a long held family tradition to discuss philosophical matters and on this particular night we were talking about the bane of materialism, the crushing pressure of life, the time poverty of modern existence when our waitress came to the table. I turned and asked where she was from and she answered China. She had been away from her homeland for a long time and readily acknowledged that a lot has changed in China from when she was there. I asked her more out of a whim than anything else what she felt was the main difference between the two countries.  Now, I honestly thought the answer would verify the points I had been making about materialism overtaking our lives. However, after reflecting about it, she turned to me and said, “FREEDOM!” 

She explained that she could go here, there, anywhere without restriction, without government intervention, without fear.  It was paradise. Her answered stopped me cold. Freedom! Movement! Lack of spatial restraint. I had never thought of that before. Here I was dwelling on useless buying habits,  as I inadvertently overlooked the subtle freedoms that go into moving from one geographical space to another.  I realized the diversity of humanity is based on its ability to move from one location to another throughout eons of history. Maybe spatial movement is a deeper part of us that we don't always understand or recognize. Maybe we should see life as a dance not only through space but mind. Anyway, it certainly was an eye opener for me, but then again that's why I love going to my favorite Japanese restaurant.

Your Best Student

A day comes when you notice a student who will do things greater than you. That's a great event in your life. It feels like the beginning and end of your life. The student who exceeds you carries on the great work that was and still is yours. You could retire now - but the teaching-learning must still go on. 

To let learn

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than -- learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they -- he has to learn to let them learn.

-- Martin Heidegger*

* What is Called Thinking? (Translated by J. Glenn Gray). One of my guiding concepts for teaching. Sometimes, I even share this "secret" with my students.